When I chanced to read Men Who Have Walked With God by Sheldon Cheney in 1986, I was informed for the first time in my 54 years old mind that Socrates mentioned the 'god within that tells us about our universe' and that he didn't fear death so he willingly drank the hemlock. This was an utterly new idea to me as were the stories about the other men who had 'walked' and been talked to by God!!
I read only fictions unless absolutely necessary and was even proud of it!!! I grew up in a very restricted environment and was not aware of it until one day I heard myself say to a woman I knew, she wasn't a friend but she was an important presence in my life as I found out later, something I'd not thought about myself. I heard myself suddenly tell her that it seemed to me I'd been raised like one of those animals in scientific experiments, in a cage, with blinders on. I'd lived without seeing certain things and I'd had certain experiences but like a mouse in a scientific experiment, they were limited. I heard myself tell her that it seemed to me suddenly I was taken from the cage, the blinders removed and I was put into a giant maze where I had to run and look for 'something'. I'd find a little of 'something' and I could rest a while but then I had to go back into the maze to find more 'something'. I didn't know what 'something' was. I did not suspect then that the maze was my every day life and the circumstances in my family at that point.
It was a few years later that the memory of the conversation was retrieved in my mind and I wondered only then, and vaguely not with a lot of curiosity, why I'd said something to her that I'd not thought about myself and had no reason to say to her!!! That is an example of how the 'depths began to enter into my everyday life, through 'embedded in the ordinary' situations.
In a casual conversation we had later, she mentioned to me that people seemed to open up to her; they told her things they wouldn't tell other people. She also mentioned she'd felt she might be going 'crazy' because she knew a woman that seemed to be able to read her thoughts, and that's 'thought broadcasting and ideas of reference' which are symptoms of schizophrenia.
I'd never heard or read those symptoms but soon afterwards I had reason to look for the definition of 'ideas of reference' in a dictionary and it was a psychiatric dictionary: "Delusional associations formed from irrational sources." I didn't know what 'irrational sources' were at that point in Time. It's a specific part of reality that is difficult to describe and impossible to validate except at the pattern level, in my opinion which is from my own experiences.
Emanuel Swedenborg is only one of the authors who have described their mental experience in life and if their work had not come to my attention, I'm sure my own mental world would never have become distinct to me as a world, with space, time with flora and fauna that's different than the physical world. I would have lived my entire life believing my thoughts, impulses, habits were 'me'.
P. D. Ouspensky's books as I've mentioned several times came to me before I read the first quotation from Swedenborg in a book authored by Wilson van Dusen, The Presence of Other Worlds. It contained the term 'double thought' which I read and paused to wonder about what it could mean, but only briefly. That was an unrecognized irrational 'bit of information' aimed at me before I'd had experiences and information that would cause me to recognize the two words were being 'said to me'. They described to me an aspect of my own thought that had begun to operate on and in the most private content as well as the visible content in my life.
The term 'double thought' became meaning-filled to me one day in 1987 when I was at work and a thought occurred into my mind as a result of what I was physically doing at Boeing in the Auburn fabrication building where I worked. I was having some unusual events and this was only one of them: I walked onto a metal grid floor that suddenly seemed invisible because a light was in the room below the floor. The thought was that I seemed to be able to see around me but also what was going on below me. I noticed very distinctly that the thought was 'batched' into a unit with no spaces between the words and the 'unit' was repeated so immediately and at such speed that it was nearly undetectable. It had the effect of 're-hearing' thought produced by what I was doing. I had begun to notice this 'effect', and be curious about it over a span of 2 very long years.
The repeated 'unit' seemed to be spoken to me the way a person would speak to me. That attribute was distinct in this specific event. Finally.
In the early 1950's I watched a documentary of John Lilly and his work with dolphins and how he learned to communicate with them. I remember a thought that occurred into my mind as I watched the show: "I wonder what it must feel like to learn a language from a creature so different as a man must be to those dolphins?" That thought re-occurred into my mind afterwards over a span of years for no reason that I could see and eventually because there was no connection to anything I wondered why the thought repeated. This thought and the content, which is about learning a new language from some 'thing' that is more than unexpected in how it 'talked' to me, were installed earlier in life for use later. Swedenborg described them as 'remains' and Ouspensky mentioned he had 're-occurring memories' that had a peculiar sense that marked them. There were a few other 're-occurring thoughts', quite different in content and eventually I wondered about them also.
Sometime in 1988 as best I can date it I noticed a Thinking Allowed documentary of John Lilly, From Here to Alternity and decided to watch it only because his name was familiar. I was stunned but delighted when he mentioned Earth Coincidence Control Office, ECCO. Although the word 'echo' had been coming to my attention in several different situations that had nothing to do with 'coincidences' to me. But when he mentioned ECCO I felt a link between what I had begun to name and think about as the Larger Domain. "HE KNOWS ABOUT THE LARGER DOMAIN!"
The word 'coincidence' had never occurred to me as a definition for the way my own thought was seeming to be linked to what was happening outside of my body.
This is a recent find on the Internet: The rose colored highlights are my additions.
"EARTH : COINCIDENCE : CONTROL : OFFICE “There is an invisible force, entity, or organization of higher dimension that controls what we think are coincidental events in everyday situations. John C. Lilly called it ECCO. According to John, ECCO also seems to control human evolution, as well as reverberating with the idea of synchroncity that was mentioned by C. G. Jung; implicate order of David Bohm (it's all a matter of 'wizzywig' i.e wysiwyg); non-local communication network of Bell’s Theorem, contingent system of Lyall Watson, and cybernetic network of Gregory Bateson who wrote that .(paranoia is 'like' knowledge)"
This is a quotation from C. G. Jung's Red Book which was recently published,:
In I9I8, Jung wrote a paper entitled "On the unconscious," where he noted that all of us stood between two worlds: the world of external perception and the world of perception of the unconscious.
This distinction depicts his experience at this time. He wrote that Friedrich Schiller had claimed that the approximation of these two worlds was through art. By contrast, Jung argued, "I am of the opinion that the union of rational and irrational truth is to be found not so much in art as in the symbol per se; for it is the
essence of the symbol to contain both the rational and irrational.",
Symbols, he maintained, stemmed from the unconscious, and the creation of symbols was the most important function of the unconscious. While the compensatory function of the unconscious was always present, the symbol-creating function was present only when we were willing to recognize it Here, we see him continuing to eschew viewing his productions as art. It was not art but symbols which were of paramount importance here. The recognition and recuperation of this symbol-creating power is portrayed in Liber Novus. It depicts Jung's attempt to understand the psychological nature of symbolism and to view his fantasies symbolically. He concluded that what was unconscious at any given epoch was only relative, and changing. What was required now was the "remolding of our views in accordance with the active forces of the unconscious." Thus the task confronting him was one of translating the conceptions gained through his confrontation with the unconscious, and expressed in a literary and symbolic manner in Liber Novus, into a language that was compatible with the contemporary outlook.
Ernst Cassirer's Language and Myth is a slender book , it's a discussion of the 'form' of
myth and it's origins. The 'form' itself seems to me to be as Jung wrote, a pattern inherent in 'man' but parables in the Bible are that 'form'.
This blog is my attempt to describe what I have learned as well as the difficult task of describing how I learned from the 'voice of the planet' after 1984. It's what some people experience as 'synchronistic events' but the 'voice aspect' isn't easy to detect because years of events reveal that attribute. It's an identification process, as well as a communication of information to that individual, from...?
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
The Science of synchronicity
There's something about acquiring 'wisdom' that requires learning to get information from every day content, much as Freud and Jung 'discovered' there was meaning in 'every day pathology'; interpreting as an artist does, not always dreams but whatever is brought to one's attention in a certain way. There's a difference and sometimes that can be a shock! Literally. About language P. D. Ouspensky says better than I can say and I'm repeating this from my first post: "It must be admitted that language is a weak and inadequate vehicle even for the expression of our usual understanding of things, to say nothing of those moments when the understanding unexpectedly expands and becomes deeper, and we see revealed an entire series of facts and relations for the description of which we have neither words nor expressions. But quite aside from this, in ordinary conditions of thinking and feeling, we are frequently at a loss for words, and we use one word at different times to describe different things"
"No study of occult philosophy is possible without an acquaintance with symbolism, for if the words occultism and symbolism are correctly used, they mean almost one and the same thing. Symbolism cannot be learned as one learns to build bridges or speak a foreign language, and for the interpretation of symbols a special cast of mind is necessary; in addition to knowledge, special faculties, the power of creative thought and a developed imagination are required.
But even then a special training of the mind is necessary, in order to comprehend the "language of the Initiates", and to express in this language the intuitions as they arise. There are many methods for developing the "sense of symbols" in those who are striving to understand the hidden forces of Nature and Man, and for teaching the fundamental principles as well as the elements of the esoteric language. The most synthetic, and one of the most interesting of these methods, is the Tarot"
Freud described a somewhat similar idea which I will quote again verbatim because it's important: "Often in explaining his ideas Freud resorts to analogies or conceptions from the physical world. Another conception of his is “that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75" This is the transcendental function: , 'which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea 'like' an electric charge.
(Freud didn't name this function as the 'transcendental function' it was Jung who did describe it as being a function similar to a mathematical function. I believe this is an accurate description of the transcendental function: some ‘thing’ having all the attributes of a quantity, "capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea 'like' an electric charge over the surface of the body...that's an encyclopedia of implication. That function sorts out, creates significance, importance and relationship in the process of self observation, and life re-view, it brought my central idea to my attention over a span of decades, sorting it out from millions of books, trillions of words.)
What I know about synchronicity as a language that taught itself to me, from a state of ignorance about it's existence has caused me to believe there's a scientific way to validate individual experience, a pattern that many individuals do experience without any validation. What I know and understand about 'synchronicity' now is the result of 75 years of experiences because the first memory I had on this planet had a 'double context', a 'double meaning' and that's where 'meaningful coincidences' arise. The memory re-occurred throughout my life, a memory that was as complete as the moment had happened and eventually (I'm a slow learner) I wondered why it flashed briefly into my mind. It was a photograph of what I was looking at, a bare light bulb above me; how I felt, cold; what I heard, the wind whistling through boards of the one car garage my parents were renting in 1934; the knowledge that my new baby sister was laying on the same bed; and a thought that occurred into my mind: "I am in a cold place."
That re-occuring memory of a physical world moment had a literal and a psychological context relating to being born in the depression to barely educated teen aged parents. Several events happened before I was 13 years old, that formed a foundation for recognizing foresight into our lives, by re-occurring into my mind for no reason I could see. Anyone would be curious eventually and wonder about those 'ghosts along the backroads of the mind.' They marked the back roads of the mind. Who would suspect there are levels in the mind that produce content that cannot be related to immediately?
When Mt. St. Helens blew her dusty innards on May 18, 1980 at 8:32 a.m, the eruption from my own depths had begun, but that's a fact that took about 2 decades to emerge as an acceptable idea.
At times, in a few events there was a synchronization between not just my own inner content but with activities that involved a group of other people I knew then. That's important to get that fact established that it was not a private synchronization there were other people and events in the outside world acting and speaking in my private contexts. This is not unusual experience, it's happening more and more today to individuals who know nothing about Ouspenskiy, Jung, Freud, or history itself. Literalness has a lot to do with how synchronization in an individualizing process becomes distinct, it creates self reference as well as creating a kind of conversation, if other people experience anything similar. Literally two small groups of individuals were somewhat at war with each other and the mainstream square dancers in our area in the early 1980's.
That memory was a snap shot of what was in front of me at the moment the thought occurred to me, as well as a thought that occurred into my mind: "I am in a cold place." There's another term that's probably not familiar to anyone reading this blog: 'double thought', and yet another name that may surprise some readers, thought broadcasting/ideas of reference. These are defined as symptoms of delusional thinking because the contexts and content are not at this time validated by scientists, because a process of individuation is not recognized.
"No study of occult philosophy is possible without an acquaintance with symbolism, for if the words occultism and symbolism are correctly used, they mean almost one and the same thing. Symbolism cannot be learned as one learns to build bridges or speak a foreign language, and for the interpretation of symbols a special cast of mind is necessary; in addition to knowledge, special faculties, the power of creative thought and a developed imagination are required.
But even then a special training of the mind is necessary, in order to comprehend the "language of the Initiates", and to express in this language the intuitions as they arise. There are many methods for developing the "sense of symbols" in those who are striving to understand the hidden forces of Nature and Man, and for teaching the fundamental principles as well as the elements of the esoteric language. The most synthetic, and one of the most interesting of these methods, is the Tarot"
Freud described a somewhat similar idea which I will quote again verbatim because it's important: "Often in explaining his ideas Freud resorts to analogies or conceptions from the physical world. Another conception of his is “that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75" This is the transcendental function: , 'which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea 'like' an electric charge.
(Freud didn't name this function as the 'transcendental function' it was Jung who did describe it as being a function similar to a mathematical function. I believe this is an accurate description of the transcendental function: some ‘thing’ having all the attributes of a quantity, "capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea 'like' an electric charge over the surface of the body...that's an encyclopedia of implication. That function sorts out, creates significance, importance and relationship in the process of self observation, and life re-view, it brought my central idea to my attention over a span of decades, sorting it out from millions of books, trillions of words.)
What I know about synchronicity as a language that taught itself to me, from a state of ignorance about it's existence has caused me to believe there's a scientific way to validate individual experience, a pattern that many individuals do experience without any validation. What I know and understand about 'synchronicity' now is the result of 75 years of experiences because the first memory I had on this planet had a 'double context', a 'double meaning' and that's where 'meaningful coincidences' arise. The memory re-occurred throughout my life, a memory that was as complete as the moment had happened and eventually (I'm a slow learner) I wondered why it flashed briefly into my mind. It was a photograph of what I was looking at, a bare light bulb above me; how I felt, cold; what I heard, the wind whistling through boards of the one car garage my parents were renting in 1934; the knowledge that my new baby sister was laying on the same bed; and a thought that occurred into my mind: "I am in a cold place."
That re-occuring memory of a physical world moment had a literal and a psychological context relating to being born in the depression to barely educated teen aged parents. Several events happened before I was 13 years old, that formed a foundation for recognizing foresight into our lives, by re-occurring into my mind for no reason I could see. Anyone would be curious eventually and wonder about those 'ghosts along the backroads of the mind.' They marked the back roads of the mind. Who would suspect there are levels in the mind that produce content that cannot be related to immediately?
When Mt. St. Helens blew her dusty innards on May 18, 1980 at 8:32 a.m, the eruption from my own depths had begun, but that's a fact that took about 2 decades to emerge as an acceptable idea.
At times, in a few events there was a synchronization between not just my own inner content but with activities that involved a group of other people I knew then. That's important to get that fact established that it was not a private synchronization there were other people and events in the outside world acting and speaking in my private contexts. This is not unusual experience, it's happening more and more today to individuals who know nothing about Ouspenskiy, Jung, Freud, or history itself. Literalness has a lot to do with how synchronization in an individualizing process becomes distinct, it creates self reference as well as creating a kind of conversation, if other people experience anything similar. Literally two small groups of individuals were somewhat at war with each other and the mainstream square dancers in our area in the early 1980's.
That memory was a snap shot of what was in front of me at the moment the thought occurred to me, as well as a thought that occurred into my mind: "I am in a cold place." There's another term that's probably not familiar to anyone reading this blog: 'double thought', and yet another name that may surprise some readers, thought broadcasting/ideas of reference. These are defined as symptoms of delusional thinking because the contexts and content are not at this time validated by scientists, because a process of individuation is not recognized.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
A Sunday Morning in November, revised 11-15-2010
"Somebody said that it couldn't be done, at least nobody ever has done it." Edgar Guest.
“It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening”—H. G. Wells, 24 January 1902, lecture given at the Royal Institute, London. “The Discovery of the Future”.
I believe everyone has an opportunity to do something in life that nobody has ever done before, it's our reason for being and becoming an individual. Emanuel Swedenborg wrote that every person has a particular 'genius' which I interpret to mean a particular task in life, that no other person has. That's probably where the processes of individuation occur. Discovering a process of life that individualizes every event has been a small part of my task in life but it's our collective task also. Recognizing it was being shown to me was the larger part, I didn't go looking for anything. I now believe we each and all are required to locate that 'sequestered hidden world within' because that's where the task is revealed, in the very deeps of our mind. Emanuel Swedenborg named the process accurately it seems to me, as 'regeneration' because he believed life in the body is preparation for life after death. He was given evidence that's convincing to me now although if I'd not read Robert Monroe's Journeys Out of Body and Far Journey's before reading anything Swedenborg wrote, I'm sure I would have felt differently. They both described mental adventures that happened 'while yet in their bed'. Swedenborg wrote that what happens in life and the choices that are made in life determine what life after life in the body will be.
I know that the process happens in life as a 'life re-view' literally, but it's not like someone announces it, that has to be discovered. "What a gift ye give us, to see ourselves as others see us." W. B. Yeats
Ira Progoff's The Dynamics of Hope, Perspectives of Process in Anxiety and Creativity, Imagery and Dreams is in my opinion a great book, and is the result of his recognition of that process in his life. I remember reading Monica Furlong's The End Of Our Exploring, an exploration by a young woman of the various paths in life at time when it was a path I didn't suspect or know anything about. You don't have to be a genius, just be willing to learn and change your mind.
This morning I watched Sunday Morning on Channel 7 which is one of my favorite shows usually. Several segments were especially meaningful to me, and relevant to the task I have reason to believe was assigned to me before I was born. We may be information in a body! One episode in particular was about soldiers who were denied Medal of Honor awards because forsenic tests done in an autopsy were accepted as evidence that didn't support what eye witnesses had said happened. There was a specific incident, a specific soldier shielded his men and saved them from a grenade, they reported it themselves, but forsenics 'proved' otherwise. Forsenics proved that consciouness could not have caused the act of heroism to be done. I fumed about how 'analysis and statistics' over ruled witnesses and real live experiencers report, I've had that happen to me too often.
Later, as I went about making my bed I thought about wars and what is required of men. That reminded me of an incident that happened in 1964. We had just moved to Seattle from Indiana. I was washing dishes when I heard my 5 years old son call to me. He was watching the news, war news. "Mommie, how do the soldiers in airplanes that are throwing bombs down and shooting guns know who the bad people are?" It's a question I'd not asked my self, so I just told him they had no way of knowing who the bad people were."Some good people get killed accidentally."
"I don't ever want to be a soldier, mommie." he said.
I remember feeling a degree of shock that he wasn't patriotic and that I had not taught him patriotism! I remember feeling a kind of horror that he would say he didn't ever want to be a soldier! Later when war protesters arose from his generation I thought there must have been other little boys watching the news and they asked their mother the question that son had asked me. Maybe they got the same answer and made the same decision. He was watching the news not long after that when he called to me. "MOMMIE, some bad guy shot Mr. Kennedy."
I had to realize this morning how at less than 6 years old, he had seen news happen and thought about things I'd never thought about when I was half a century old. Seeing something happen rather than just reading about it made a big difference, probably.
But there may be some truth to the idea of destiny. By that I mean that what needs to happen in Time does happen, but when its supposed to happen and only then. So our family Destiny might have prevented me from inquiring until later in life about what a very young boy noticed and wondered aloud to me about. I also remembered that when he played with his blocks one morning he got up, chuckling to himself as he toddled off to the kitchen: "Something in my head told me to get a drink of water." I remember thinking that seemed a strange thing for an 18 months old toddler to say. "Something in my head told me to get a drink of water." ???
I have come to believe in destiny or something like a Great Plan in life in which we enter if we can become conscious enough of the prime initiator, which is curiosity and a need to find a truth about some trivial seeming detail in real life. It's a need that's so great that after it's switched on permanently it operates like a motor aimed at locating the truth in a specific life in very specific circumstances. My search for truth required lack of curiosity for more than half a century. Then the 'switch' was turned on pemanently. At this point I'm somewhat amused at my self, at times because I feel a toddler like fascination and insatiable curiosity about everything. That's a fact about old age that I didn't suspect.
Another segment on this Sunday Morning was about Madame Curie and her double Nobel Prize awards in science. What arose in my mind then was that there should be an award for people like me who don't go into higher education, never went into a laboratory, never did scientific experiements but who feel somehow they have made a discovery in their life that nobody else has written about, that we do have connection to an intelligence other than our own. "Work done for another level." That's the way P. D. Ouspensky seemed to me to have described his experience with that kind of participation in the 'Larger Domain' of life; his task was searching for a way to get new information.
Those of us who lived the events in their life and tried to understand them; even could prove them in the scienific mode if individual truth can be proved, experience rejection and being labeled a crank or worse.
Trying to prove my personal interpretations when it was necessary to find out whether I imagine things or not was only possible after the sense of needing to find the truth in real life was activated permanently. That didn't happen when I was 6 years old. Some situations in real life happened but a new sense made that kind of need for truth was not only possible but very, very necessary. It seemed to be a new sense until I found out it's an old sense, it's really a pattern. Pattern recognition may be what I have been directed to notice, I don't claim to have noticed it myself.
Wanting recognition seems to be part of the 'drive' behind the search for truth; especially when the search results in facts that displace much that's been accepted as truth by the collective. The mind itself has to be the object of study and most individuals do not feel driven to understand their own mind, or to become 'psychoanalytic' to the degree Freud, Jung, Swedenborg and William Blake accomplished in their individualized life. A strange detachment from the body creates 'self observation' from either the depths or some Other that's got a goal of it's own. There seems to be constant consciousness on that level, it's not asleep, ever. There are points in the past where radical changes occurred when a new idea occurred in the mind of at least one man.
This morning's segment about Madame Curie was an exception to the usual rule. I thought about what a lucky person she was to marry a scientist, they didn't war between themselves about some of the gender based issues I've confronted.
Last week I read Tolerance, The story of man's struggle to think by Hendrik Van Loon, and that caused me to consider my own past, which is about the incredible struggle of a woman to think independently, to think what has never been thought by anyone else. Where do ideas come from?" is the question, can that be explained by scientific analysis?
In the mid 1990's I read a book, The Arrow of Time that reported how Ludwig Boltzmann could not bear the very great torment of knowing he was 'right' and ended himself just before his idea began to be accepted by his peers. I know there must be other examples that I don't know about of how difficult it is to be 'certain without doubt' and find no, or not much validation.
I've read books authored by individuals who never became famous yet their book contained information that was more valuable than an encyclopedia of information! Sometimes the information made no sense when I read the book, years of experience had to happen before the book made sense. (Bond of Power by Joseph Chilton Pearce, which was re-issued under a different name, The Biology of Transcendence; Ira Progoff's The Symbolic and The Real are two examples.)
Sometimes the book verified my own experiences exactly and I felt a very great relief and thankfulness coupled with an anguish of frustration. Why should such information be available and so few people know about it? Why do people quarrel about every thing they don't agree with? (Ira Progoff's The Dynamics of Hope; Maurice Nicolls' Living Time and Integration of the Life; The Re-Creating of the Individual by Beatice Hinkle are examples of that kind of validating book. )
There was yet a third kind of book which after I read it caused me to close it and then my mind seemed to 'use' or 're-use' the ideas in the book and present the authors ideas in a completely different context than the author had done. Such a book was The Lord of Thought by Emmett and Dougall which I've already mentioned but The Phenomonen of Man by Teilhard de Chardin had been one book that my mind seemed to select to give me information that the author had not explicitly included in his own book. I felt an explosion of information I'd not thought about ever, even once in my life about how 'man' has not been categorized, classified and how difficult it would be for 'man' to 'see' his own life the way we see animals and other living and non living objects.
I had to create a name that kind of explosion of inner content because there was a demand to 'name what you see, describe what you see' included in it. I named them 'mindquakes' but it's very likely other authors used more well known, more scholarly words whose meanings are obscure to individuals like me.
It seems to me at this point that a certain 'sense' has to be active to some degree or to an excessive degree that initiates a search for and a need to establish what is true in the individual life.
I felt that those of us who quarrel with the science of the collective, and who survived with enough sanity intact to function somewhat usefully and decently should have a category in the Nobel Prizes.
"Somebody said that it couldn't be done, at least nobody ever has done it." Edgar Guest. It could be done.
“It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening”—H. G. Wells, 24 January 1902, lecture given at the Royal Institute, London. “The Discovery of the Future”.
I believe everyone has an opportunity to do something in life that nobody has ever done before, it's our reason for being and becoming an individual. Emanuel Swedenborg wrote that every person has a particular 'genius' which I interpret to mean a particular task in life, that no other person has. That's probably where the processes of individuation occur. Discovering a process of life that individualizes every event has been a small part of my task in life but it's our collective task also. Recognizing it was being shown to me was the larger part, I didn't go looking for anything. I now believe we each and all are required to locate that 'sequestered hidden world within' because that's where the task is revealed, in the very deeps of our mind. Emanuel Swedenborg named the process accurately it seems to me, as 'regeneration' because he believed life in the body is preparation for life after death. He was given evidence that's convincing to me now although if I'd not read Robert Monroe's Journeys Out of Body and Far Journey's before reading anything Swedenborg wrote, I'm sure I would have felt differently. They both described mental adventures that happened 'while yet in their bed'. Swedenborg wrote that what happens in life and the choices that are made in life determine what life after life in the body will be.
I know that the process happens in life as a 'life re-view' literally, but it's not like someone announces it, that has to be discovered. "What a gift ye give us, to see ourselves as others see us." W. B. Yeats
Ira Progoff's The Dynamics of Hope, Perspectives of Process in Anxiety and Creativity, Imagery and Dreams is in my opinion a great book, and is the result of his recognition of that process in his life. I remember reading Monica Furlong's The End Of Our Exploring, an exploration by a young woman of the various paths in life at time when it was a path I didn't suspect or know anything about. You don't have to be a genius, just be willing to learn and change your mind.
This morning I watched Sunday Morning on Channel 7 which is one of my favorite shows usually. Several segments were especially meaningful to me, and relevant to the task I have reason to believe was assigned to me before I was born. We may be information in a body! One episode in particular was about soldiers who were denied Medal of Honor awards because forsenic tests done in an autopsy were accepted as evidence that didn't support what eye witnesses had said happened. There was a specific incident, a specific soldier shielded his men and saved them from a grenade, they reported it themselves, but forsenics 'proved' otherwise. Forsenics proved that consciouness could not have caused the act of heroism to be done. I fumed about how 'analysis and statistics' over ruled witnesses and real live experiencers report, I've had that happen to me too often.
Later, as I went about making my bed I thought about wars and what is required of men. That reminded me of an incident that happened in 1964. We had just moved to Seattle from Indiana. I was washing dishes when I heard my 5 years old son call to me. He was watching the news, war news. "Mommie, how do the soldiers in airplanes that are throwing bombs down and shooting guns know who the bad people are?" It's a question I'd not asked my self, so I just told him they had no way of knowing who the bad people were."Some good people get killed accidentally."
"I don't ever want to be a soldier, mommie." he said.
I remember feeling a degree of shock that he wasn't patriotic and that I had not taught him patriotism! I remember feeling a kind of horror that he would say he didn't ever want to be a soldier! Later when war protesters arose from his generation I thought there must have been other little boys watching the news and they asked their mother the question that son had asked me. Maybe they got the same answer and made the same decision. He was watching the news not long after that when he called to me. "MOMMIE, some bad guy shot Mr. Kennedy."
I had to realize this morning how at less than 6 years old, he had seen news happen and thought about things I'd never thought about when I was half a century old. Seeing something happen rather than just reading about it made a big difference, probably.
But there may be some truth to the idea of destiny. By that I mean that what needs to happen in Time does happen, but when its supposed to happen and only then. So our family Destiny might have prevented me from inquiring until later in life about what a very young boy noticed and wondered aloud to me about. I also remembered that when he played with his blocks one morning he got up, chuckling to himself as he toddled off to the kitchen: "Something in my head told me to get a drink of water." I remember thinking that seemed a strange thing for an 18 months old toddler to say. "Something in my head told me to get a drink of water." ???
I have come to believe in destiny or something like a Great Plan in life in which we enter if we can become conscious enough of the prime initiator, which is curiosity and a need to find a truth about some trivial seeming detail in real life. It's a need that's so great that after it's switched on permanently it operates like a motor aimed at locating the truth in a specific life in very specific circumstances. My search for truth required lack of curiosity for more than half a century. Then the 'switch' was turned on pemanently. At this point I'm somewhat amused at my self, at times because I feel a toddler like fascination and insatiable curiosity about everything. That's a fact about old age that I didn't suspect.
Another segment on this Sunday Morning was about Madame Curie and her double Nobel Prize awards in science. What arose in my mind then was that there should be an award for people like me who don't go into higher education, never went into a laboratory, never did scientific experiements but who feel somehow they have made a discovery in their life that nobody else has written about, that we do have connection to an intelligence other than our own. "Work done for another level." That's the way P. D. Ouspensky seemed to me to have described his experience with that kind of participation in the 'Larger Domain' of life; his task was searching for a way to get new information.
Those of us who lived the events in their life and tried to understand them; even could prove them in the scienific mode if individual truth can be proved, experience rejection and being labeled a crank or worse.
Trying to prove my personal interpretations when it was necessary to find out whether I imagine things or not was only possible after the sense of needing to find the truth in real life was activated permanently. That didn't happen when I was 6 years old. Some situations in real life happened but a new sense made that kind of need for truth was not only possible but very, very necessary. It seemed to be a new sense until I found out it's an old sense, it's really a pattern. Pattern recognition may be what I have been directed to notice, I don't claim to have noticed it myself.
Wanting recognition seems to be part of the 'drive' behind the search for truth; especially when the search results in facts that displace much that's been accepted as truth by the collective. The mind itself has to be the object of study and most individuals do not feel driven to understand their own mind, or to become 'psychoanalytic' to the degree Freud, Jung, Swedenborg and William Blake accomplished in their individualized life. A strange detachment from the body creates 'self observation' from either the depths or some Other that's got a goal of it's own. There seems to be constant consciousness on that level, it's not asleep, ever. There are points in the past where radical changes occurred when a new idea occurred in the mind of at least one man.
This morning's segment about Madame Curie was an exception to the usual rule. I thought about what a lucky person she was to marry a scientist, they didn't war between themselves about some of the gender based issues I've confronted.
Last week I read Tolerance, The story of man's struggle to think by Hendrik Van Loon, and that caused me to consider my own past, which is about the incredible struggle of a woman to think independently, to think what has never been thought by anyone else. Where do ideas come from?" is the question, can that be explained by scientific analysis?
In the mid 1990's I read a book, The Arrow of Time that reported how Ludwig Boltzmann could not bear the very great torment of knowing he was 'right' and ended himself just before his idea began to be accepted by his peers. I know there must be other examples that I don't know about of how difficult it is to be 'certain without doubt' and find no, or not much validation.
I've read books authored by individuals who never became famous yet their book contained information that was more valuable than an encyclopedia of information! Sometimes the information made no sense when I read the book, years of experience had to happen before the book made sense. (Bond of Power by Joseph Chilton Pearce, which was re-issued under a different name, The Biology of Transcendence; Ira Progoff's The Symbolic and The Real are two examples.)
Sometimes the book verified my own experiences exactly and I felt a very great relief and thankfulness coupled with an anguish of frustration. Why should such information be available and so few people know about it? Why do people quarrel about every thing they don't agree with? (Ira Progoff's The Dynamics of Hope; Maurice Nicolls' Living Time and Integration of the Life; The Re-Creating of the Individual by Beatice Hinkle are examples of that kind of validating book. )
There was yet a third kind of book which after I read it caused me to close it and then my mind seemed to 'use' or 're-use' the ideas in the book and present the authors ideas in a completely different context than the author had done. Such a book was The Lord of Thought by Emmett and Dougall which I've already mentioned but The Phenomonen of Man by Teilhard de Chardin had been one book that my mind seemed to select to give me information that the author had not explicitly included in his own book. I felt an explosion of information I'd not thought about ever, even once in my life about how 'man' has not been categorized, classified and how difficult it would be for 'man' to 'see' his own life the way we see animals and other living and non living objects.
I had to create a name that kind of explosion of inner content because there was a demand to 'name what you see, describe what you see' included in it. I named them 'mindquakes' but it's very likely other authors used more well known, more scholarly words whose meanings are obscure to individuals like me.
It seems to me at this point that a certain 'sense' has to be active to some degree or to an excessive degree that initiates a search for and a need to establish what is true in the individual life.
I felt that those of us who quarrel with the science of the collective, and who survived with enough sanity intact to function somewhat usefully and decently should have a category in the Nobel Prizes.
"Somebody said that it couldn't be done, at least nobody ever has done it." Edgar Guest. It could be done.
Friday, September 17, 2010
The 'organ' of self observation..updated
Aristotle voiced the cultural tendancy of his Time when he said: "The feminine principle is the mother of the body but the mother of the spirit is male." Aeschylus play Eumenides, line 659 through line 666 repeats the belief:
The mother to the child that men call hers,
Is no true Life Begetter but a nurse
Of Live Seed. Tis the sower of the Seed
Alone begetteth. woman comes at need,
A stranger, to hold safe in trust and love
That bud of new life--save when God above
Wills that it die...there have been fathers, where no mother is.
It's important not to let this idea slip through without thinking about what it means: There have been fathers where no mother is.
In The Republic Plato mentioned in a most offhand way that man possesses an organ more worthy of development than all the five senses. (I counted six: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, intuition which means inwardsly taught, that's a definition I'd learned in Latin, it's instinctive to me to believe the definition means exactly what it says).
The 'inwardsly taught' sense seems to me to be 'art' in all it's forms but that took a long time to become aware of; I didn't understand what 'art' is until I was in my 70's. Overall it's a pattern-making function: it creates symbols, defines them, recognizes them in different manifestations (generalizing) and creates seemingly new patterns appropriate to the Time in the individuation process and probably in the collective. The 'ancient' symbol is often hidden from the new ones but there is a connection as I found out myself when I recognized a form of the ancient uroborous (the snake devouring its own tail) in a logo Boeing used to promote 'continuous improvement' in the mid 1990's. The image was only a circle,shaded from a very dark color to lighter color but I recognized the ancient form, which I'd only noticed myself recently! It's supposed to be the symbol of 'wholeness' but that's a very strange definition in my thinking which was at that point not attached to ancient meanings or their 'icons'.
Such a function of mind created several new patterns that I lived unknowingly myself. but they were unconnected to the past, at least some of them, because technology not psychology or philosophy was involved.
They were my private frustrations for years until it was obvious many females were walking the same path in their homes. My significant other was constantly switching the channel during commercials; not asking for directions when it was obvious we were lost; had a toddler-like cunning at times; an aversion to rules imposed by authority; disliked very much unsolicited suggestions. And any situation that produced feelings of lack of authority was met with an immediate retreat from the situation.That became a pattern that pointed towards a lot of psychological insight on some level of mind as well as foresight into the actual situation!
My life 'change' began with reading symptoms of male menopause one day, and recognizing that pattern was operating in our life. Then I tried to talk about it! I didn't know that 'menopause' was a change to the male! It was a female experience until quite by chance, or the operations of destiny itself, I read about it in a book. I recognized it explained the sudden conflict between us, at least some of it. It was information about my life at the moment, a kind of coincidence that I read the book, but it was useless information in the early 1980's .Even having seen the movie Ash Wednesday with Elisabeth Tayhor, which had depicted a woman's mid life crisis when her husband told her he wanted a divorce, so he could enjoy life after a struggle to establish himself. He wanted to start over while he still had a chance, he found a younger woman. She tried to entice him back by plastic surgery, I didn't recognized the male pattern in menopause until a few years later, when several well established marriages ended in divorce. However when it intiated a 'change of life' in my location on the planet, in 1981 and I heard basically the same words that I read in a book.
That has changed in a quarter of a century, it's a collectively lived pattern now, isn't it? We seem to all be living through 'male menopause' patterns, vicariously sharing that pattern of change and all it embodied to the females like me, especially me: empty nest pattern; displaced housewife; but also just about every negative stereotype about the female that's been put into words by someone other than a female. The positive stereotypes happen to some females, but not all of us.
There are levels in life where negative is necessary, essential, that side of life has to be lived too. Cosmic level 'good' supercedes all other levels. What was negative for a long time, when everything that happened seemed against what I wanted and hoped for happened, I've learned to get meaning from life itself. That has caused me to feel I understand real reality much better. I understand how it can seem that 'life is but a dream'.
I don't dream but the faculty that creates dreams seems to be under the authority of that 'organ' that Plato mentioned. It was a path to reality, but part of it was daily discovery of new information as I went about my life. Embedded in every day life events, some 'other' life began to emerge, bit of informaton by bit of information. Discovering that history is really his story and that there's an ongoing mystery in Time seems likely to be a basic pattern itself, one that creates 'self observation', a re-view of that life that takes place as a mental, but observable process, the process of becoming twice born.
(The quotation from Aristotle is in Re-creating of the Individual by Beatrice M. Hinkle; 1923 Harcourt, Brace and Co, available now in paperback. Incredible book, it explains the psychological re-birth very well, in my opinion. But I just read it a few weeks ago so it was validation that such a pattern does exist and that it re-creates the individual, at least some of them. Individual science, a science of the individual on that path doesn't exist yet. )
Back to Plato, who knew about that path and gave a few clues that it exists in an allegory he wrote about people chained in a cave who didn't suspect they lived in a very small world. Plato was either a secret keeper who understood that the best way to keep an idea alive so that it manifests in some form continually in Time is to make the idea dangerous. Make it a secret not to be revealed on pain of great punishment But alternatively perhaps he wrote about an 'organ more worthy of development than the five senses' automatically and had no conscious relationship to what he wrote. That idea would not occur to anyone that hasn't experienced the 'automatism' in one's own body and mind, which I have witnessed in my self, much to my amazement.
And he had no curiosity about what he wrote. That's also happened to me so I know it can happen that a person experiences very little of what their own body does. That's the foundational idea for psychiatry itself, as I discovered, although I don't believe it should apply to individuals until a certain point in life 'opens the life' of that individual, then self observation is possible. It's like a detachment from one's own body, and I don't mean 'out of body' in the literal sense. It's a movement in inner space that puts distance between my body and an organ within that uses what's in front of me to create a 'story' with only one person in the audience, me, somewhat aware of being controlled and manipulated, but by what?
That includes writing something that hasn't been thought about, saying things that haven't been thought about, doing things that seem meaningless; spontaneous and at times compellingly necessary; impulse driven activities that have no established purpose or goal. Discovering quite by impulse that such silliness has meaning and what I was 'acting out' was important, that a kind of language has to be learned, as life does the interpreting, well consciousness of that kind of meaning happens or may not happen; noticing small details and differences from 'normal' is necessary.
The pattern may be where the idea of fate, destiny, fortune originated. It's the means to keep the 'thread of an idea moving forwards in biological time'. It's my opinion now that it functions 'like' a signal, carrying a message and as McCluhan said in a different context than mine: "The medium is the message." There's no way that verbal language can describe what a leap it was for me to begin to believe events had to be interpreted, and a bigger leap that the interpretation occurred automatically in mental space. Meaning came automatically, in bits and fragments that accumulated and then created a new understanding, parallel to 'normal', or what had been normal for me Two streams of understanding..."Which is real?" I wondered after about 5 years.
It functions 'like' a perpendicular, in my opinion and it creates it's own information, I'm the observer and my past is the basis from which it's formed.
What is embedded in every day life has to be abstracted out in some way. A few events were inserted early in life, memories of those events re-occured for no reason but they made me curious about why they re-occurred. They were stored in advance for later used. When there's no conscious memory of such activities when they are initiated, when theres no eye or ear in the body that remembers such content, (well, that's the basis of psychoanalysis) that points towards different levels in the mind. But there are several mentions in the bible to the same kind of content. "ye have eyes but see not", "Let him that hath an ear"; 'ye understand not the signs of your own time', etc.
The form of speaking in 'comparisons' and 'illustrations' was old when Plato suggested an organ more worthy of development than the five senses. To make the idea into a heresy, a topic forbidden to disagree with, a secret to be kept on pain of great punishment is to guarantee it's survival through generations in Time, such that a conspiracy seems to keep it alive.
The body was certainly information encoded in some form even in the Greek era as it is today when an amazing synchronization becomes obvious between inner content and events outside the body. Many individuals experience that synchronization but getting the message requires learning to be a kind of artist, as well as a critic of one's own body. When other inner content that's not dreams but somehow visible content that has to be 'discovered' and understood, although it had a kind of visibility when it occurs, but which was as distant from the 'now' when it occured as some galaxies are from Earth, it's like observing events with a new eye, hearing with a new ear.
Such an organ is an idea that would seem to merit a chapter and a lot of detailed elaboration but as yet I I've not come across it except in off hand remarks that infer or ought to infer much. A poem often says the same thing, coded:
STAY
The clouds were pretending to be clouds
when in fact they were overheard comments
regarding his recent behavior, but muffled
as though heard through a wall. Unlike
the personal messages being conveyed to him
in the form of asides by people on TV, chilling
in their calm and unequivicable malevolence.
In the garden the roses are opening
chanting in unison, My name is Mary and
you really don't want to come near me
not if I were the last little swastika nympho
on Earth., and WHAT was THAT supposed to mean!
Then there were the others who lived there.
(Was he living there now?) They were indifferent
to him with the very striking exceptions
of two friends. He could tell they were friends'
by the marked improvement in their moods
when his was at its most truely desolate.
Franz Wright,
It works somewhat like the author writes, the effect of one persons' unconsciousness on that of another can create some uncomfortable situations. Theodore Reik's written Listening With The Third Ear and other important books about how in his life his mind seemed to create situations that led him to insight in his patients problems. Not everyone tries or expects to have to learn for themselves, how their own mind operates.
I read Plato's remark only a few years ago at a point when I had felt the mechanisms of that organ and they were already familiar to me to some degree. There are points of change, radical change in one's thought and the direction of attention. I'd recognized them as mechanisms but the effect created a more personalized interface with every thing and everything than some interactions I've had with real people.
It took about 20 years (1980-2000) to be certain there are mechanisms of mind that operate without my intentions or will and that my own mind has always had busyness of it's own and it's operated independently through out my life on a project I had to discover. Other people seemed to know it before I did, that's where the idea of 'participatory consciousness' between humans at the unconscious level began to dawn on me, when it seemed other people could read my mind. And gradually we can each recognize that the project is an ongoing endeavor in Time itself, a hint about which is in the bible where four dimensions are mentioned: height, width, breadth, depth. (Reading that was a puzzler to me, 4 dimensions?)
((Flatland by Abbot; Sphereland by Burgher; The Persian King by Charles Hinton help to convey the new way to think about perpendiculars, in my opinion anyway. Brief synopsis: The King had to learn how to motivate inert creatures that felt equal pleasure and pain, so that they would 'do' something. He figured out that by absorbing a degree of their pain the creatures felt more pleasure than pain, for a time so they lived and became active. But he had to keep them 'alive' by absorbing more and more of their pain, then when he could bear no more pain he left them inert and went with an Other that mysteriously appeared, on his way." Beautiful story. ))
The occasions when my mind operated with it's own project in mind were events that were embedded in every day life, some when I was less than 9 years old. I suspect such events happen for a reason, Jung experienced them, many authors of great books begin with an incident that happened when they were very young. Mine were very specific and they caught (or were brought to) my attention in the most subtle ways, creating a new way to relate to every aspect in my life while I struggled with certain life problems and felt literally isolated from everyone in that isolation. In that kind of isolation it's not impossible to notice there is an attempt to help, and it's all 'within'.
A hidden world emerged, but it was certainly one that caused Plato to write the Allegory of the Cave and inspired the Matrix series as well as much of our modern fantastic movies. Plato could have been more direct than using allegory perhaps except that secret keeping was essentially a device he knew would create a determination to find out what the secret is, in future generations. It (that there is a secret, really) was eventually obvious when the intensity I felt seemed to be shared by others working on the same 'project' that when I (and two small groups of other individuals in my location on this planet shared it for several years (1975-1993).
We were leaving the mainstream level literrally, learning advanced and challenge level square dancing. The mainstream dancers were not violent but we felt their outrage because gender differences were erased at that level. That made a 'fun dance' much more difficult to do, as we found out, not everyone likes to work at having fun. It's basic form is the same as the I Ching, chess, ideas of quantum physic, and certain psychological concepts, it's physically re-presentable in the moebius band, where the interaction of opposites and the interactions of similars as well as the interactions of complementary other(s) live and teach each other.
Petr D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organun, page 150-151 describes love:
"Perhaps love is a world of strange spirits who at times take up their abode in men, subduing them to themselves, making them tools for the accomplishment of their inscrutable purposes. Perhaps it is some particular region of the inner world wherein the souls of men sometimes enter, and where they live acceding to the laws of that world while their bodies remain on earth, bound by the laws of earth. It is an alchemical work of some Great Master, wherein the souls and bodies of men play the role of elements out of which is compounded a philosophers' stone, an elixir of life..."
"The philosopher is usually interested in a central idea that evolves over a long period of time, which may never be successfully completed and formulated into words , one that may appear to be mysterious and beyond scientific validation." Jean Piaget. I understand what that feels like.
I repeat this as I do other ideas that seem to need to be emphasized: From Oedipus authored by Patrick Mullahy Footnote, page 507
"Often in explaining his ideas Freud resorts to analogies or conceptions from the physical world. Another conception of his is “that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75"
It's my opinion that the 'something which should be differentiated' is an effect of the 'organ of self observation', as Swedenborg wrote in his life about a process of regeneration that occurred to him, as preparation for life after death. I don't know about that but it, (individuation/regeneration) happens in this real world, and it's not easy to get validation through science, yet. That kind of specificity in content cannot be verified easily. I've had a very rational experience, not many hallucinations were inserted, and they were always brought to my attention, eventually. That kind of inner prompting made me curious, eventually. I have never had out of body experiences such as he and Robert Monroe live, that was their life experience. But their stories made the mind and it's abilities to create it's own content and insert it into actual reality, some thing to think about. That kind of 'insertion' has happened a few times, and I've not noticed them until much later, an inner prompting brings an event to mind, and some aspect that I didn't notice is brought to my attention.
"What happened in the past is determined by what is to happen in the future." Norman O. Brown.
The mother to the child that men call hers,
Is no true Life Begetter but a nurse
Of Live Seed. Tis the sower of the Seed
Alone begetteth. woman comes at need,
A stranger, to hold safe in trust and love
That bud of new life--save when God above
Wills that it die...there have been fathers, where no mother is.
It's important not to let this idea slip through without thinking about what it means: There have been fathers where no mother is.
In The Republic Plato mentioned in a most offhand way that man possesses an organ more worthy of development than all the five senses. (I counted six: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, intuition which means inwardsly taught, that's a definition I'd learned in Latin, it's instinctive to me to believe the definition means exactly what it says).
The 'inwardsly taught' sense seems to me to be 'art' in all it's forms but that took a long time to become aware of; I didn't understand what 'art' is until I was in my 70's. Overall it's a pattern-making function: it creates symbols, defines them, recognizes them in different manifestations (generalizing) and creates seemingly new patterns appropriate to the Time in the individuation process and probably in the collective. The 'ancient' symbol is often hidden from the new ones but there is a connection as I found out myself when I recognized a form of the ancient uroborous (the snake devouring its own tail) in a logo Boeing used to promote 'continuous improvement' in the mid 1990's. The image was only a circle,shaded from a very dark color to lighter color but I recognized the ancient form, which I'd only noticed myself recently! It's supposed to be the symbol of 'wholeness' but that's a very strange definition in my thinking which was at that point not attached to ancient meanings or their 'icons'.
Such a function of mind created several new patterns that I lived unknowingly myself. but they were unconnected to the past, at least some of them, because technology not psychology or philosophy was involved.
They were my private frustrations for years until it was obvious many females were walking the same path in their homes. My significant other was constantly switching the channel during commercials; not asking for directions when it was obvious we were lost; had a toddler-like cunning at times; an aversion to rules imposed by authority; disliked very much unsolicited suggestions. And any situation that produced feelings of lack of authority was met with an immediate retreat from the situation.That became a pattern that pointed towards a lot of psychological insight on some level of mind as well as foresight into the actual situation!
My life 'change' began with reading symptoms of male menopause one day, and recognizing that pattern was operating in our life. Then I tried to talk about it! I didn't know that 'menopause' was a change to the male! It was a female experience until quite by chance, or the operations of destiny itself, I read about it in a book. I recognized it explained the sudden conflict between us, at least some of it. It was information about my life at the moment, a kind of coincidence that I read the book, but it was useless information in the early 1980's .Even having seen the movie Ash Wednesday with Elisabeth Tayhor, which had depicted a woman's mid life crisis when her husband told her he wanted a divorce, so he could enjoy life after a struggle to establish himself. He wanted to start over while he still had a chance, he found a younger woman. She tried to entice him back by plastic surgery, I didn't recognized the male pattern in menopause until a few years later, when several well established marriages ended in divorce. However when it intiated a 'change of life' in my location on the planet, in 1981 and I heard basically the same words that I read in a book.
That has changed in a quarter of a century, it's a collectively lived pattern now, isn't it? We seem to all be living through 'male menopause' patterns, vicariously sharing that pattern of change and all it embodied to the females like me, especially me: empty nest pattern; displaced housewife; but also just about every negative stereotype about the female that's been put into words by someone other than a female. The positive stereotypes happen to some females, but not all of us.
There are levels in life where negative is necessary, essential, that side of life has to be lived too. Cosmic level 'good' supercedes all other levels. What was negative for a long time, when everything that happened seemed against what I wanted and hoped for happened, I've learned to get meaning from life itself. That has caused me to feel I understand real reality much better. I understand how it can seem that 'life is but a dream'.
I don't dream but the faculty that creates dreams seems to be under the authority of that 'organ' that Plato mentioned. It was a path to reality, but part of it was daily discovery of new information as I went about my life. Embedded in every day life events, some 'other' life began to emerge, bit of informaton by bit of information. Discovering that history is really his story and that there's an ongoing mystery in Time seems likely to be a basic pattern itself, one that creates 'self observation', a re-view of that life that takes place as a mental, but observable process, the process of becoming twice born.
(The quotation from Aristotle is in Re-creating of the Individual by Beatrice M. Hinkle; 1923 Harcourt, Brace and Co, available now in paperback. Incredible book, it explains the psychological re-birth very well, in my opinion. But I just read it a few weeks ago so it was validation that such a pattern does exist and that it re-creates the individual, at least some of them. Individual science, a science of the individual on that path doesn't exist yet. )
Back to Plato, who knew about that path and gave a few clues that it exists in an allegory he wrote about people chained in a cave who didn't suspect they lived in a very small world. Plato was either a secret keeper who understood that the best way to keep an idea alive so that it manifests in some form continually in Time is to make the idea dangerous. Make it a secret not to be revealed on pain of great punishment But alternatively perhaps he wrote about an 'organ more worthy of development than the five senses' automatically and had no conscious relationship to what he wrote. That idea would not occur to anyone that hasn't experienced the 'automatism' in one's own body and mind, which I have witnessed in my self, much to my amazement.
And he had no curiosity about what he wrote. That's also happened to me so I know it can happen that a person experiences very little of what their own body does. That's the foundational idea for psychiatry itself, as I discovered, although I don't believe it should apply to individuals until a certain point in life 'opens the life' of that individual, then self observation is possible. It's like a detachment from one's own body, and I don't mean 'out of body' in the literal sense. It's a movement in inner space that puts distance between my body and an organ within that uses what's in front of me to create a 'story' with only one person in the audience, me, somewhat aware of being controlled and manipulated, but by what?
That includes writing something that hasn't been thought about, saying things that haven't been thought about, doing things that seem meaningless; spontaneous and at times compellingly necessary; impulse driven activities that have no established purpose or goal. Discovering quite by impulse that such silliness has meaning and what I was 'acting out' was important, that a kind of language has to be learned, as life does the interpreting, well consciousness of that kind of meaning happens or may not happen; noticing small details and differences from 'normal' is necessary.
The pattern may be where the idea of fate, destiny, fortune originated. It's the means to keep the 'thread of an idea moving forwards in biological time'. It's my opinion now that it functions 'like' a signal, carrying a message and as McCluhan said in a different context than mine: "The medium is the message." There's no way that verbal language can describe what a leap it was for me to begin to believe events had to be interpreted, and a bigger leap that the interpretation occurred automatically in mental space. Meaning came automatically, in bits and fragments that accumulated and then created a new understanding, parallel to 'normal', or what had been normal for me Two streams of understanding..."Which is real?" I wondered after about 5 years.
It functions 'like' a perpendicular, in my opinion and it creates it's own information, I'm the observer and my past is the basis from which it's formed.
What is embedded in every day life has to be abstracted out in some way. A few events were inserted early in life, memories of those events re-occured for no reason but they made me curious about why they re-occurred. They were stored in advance for later used. When there's no conscious memory of such activities when they are initiated, when theres no eye or ear in the body that remembers such content, (well, that's the basis of psychoanalysis) that points towards different levels in the mind. But there are several mentions in the bible to the same kind of content. "ye have eyes but see not", "Let him that hath an ear"; 'ye understand not the signs of your own time', etc.
The form of speaking in 'comparisons' and 'illustrations' was old when Plato suggested an organ more worthy of development than the five senses. To make the idea into a heresy, a topic forbidden to disagree with, a secret to be kept on pain of great punishment is to guarantee it's survival through generations in Time, such that a conspiracy seems to keep it alive.
The body was certainly information encoded in some form even in the Greek era as it is today when an amazing synchronization becomes obvious between inner content and events outside the body. Many individuals experience that synchronization but getting the message requires learning to be a kind of artist, as well as a critic of one's own body. When other inner content that's not dreams but somehow visible content that has to be 'discovered' and understood, although it had a kind of visibility when it occurs, but which was as distant from the 'now' when it occured as some galaxies are from Earth, it's like observing events with a new eye, hearing with a new ear.
Such an organ is an idea that would seem to merit a chapter and a lot of detailed elaboration but as yet I I've not come across it except in off hand remarks that infer or ought to infer much. A poem often says the same thing, coded:
STAY
The clouds were pretending to be clouds
when in fact they were overheard comments
regarding his recent behavior, but muffled
as though heard through a wall. Unlike
the personal messages being conveyed to him
in the form of asides by people on TV, chilling
in their calm and unequivicable malevolence.
In the garden the roses are opening
chanting in unison, My name is Mary and
you really don't want to come near me
not if I were the last little swastika nympho
on Earth., and WHAT was THAT supposed to mean!
Then there were the others who lived there.
(Was he living there now?) They were indifferent
to him with the very striking exceptions
of two friends. He could tell they were friends'
by the marked improvement in their moods
when his was at its most truely desolate.
Franz Wright,
It works somewhat like the author writes, the effect of one persons' unconsciousness on that of another can create some uncomfortable situations. Theodore Reik's written Listening With The Third Ear and other important books about how in his life his mind seemed to create situations that led him to insight in his patients problems. Not everyone tries or expects to have to learn for themselves, how their own mind operates.
I read Plato's remark only a few years ago at a point when I had felt the mechanisms of that organ and they were already familiar to me to some degree. There are points of change, radical change in one's thought and the direction of attention. I'd recognized them as mechanisms but the effect created a more personalized interface with every thing and everything than some interactions I've had with real people.
It took about 20 years (1980-2000) to be certain there are mechanisms of mind that operate without my intentions or will and that my own mind has always had busyness of it's own and it's operated independently through out my life on a project I had to discover. Other people seemed to know it before I did, that's where the idea of 'participatory consciousness' between humans at the unconscious level began to dawn on me, when it seemed other people could read my mind. And gradually we can each recognize that the project is an ongoing endeavor in Time itself, a hint about which is in the bible where four dimensions are mentioned: height, width, breadth, depth. (Reading that was a puzzler to me, 4 dimensions?)
((Flatland by Abbot; Sphereland by Burgher; The Persian King by Charles Hinton help to convey the new way to think about perpendiculars, in my opinion anyway. Brief synopsis: The King had to learn how to motivate inert creatures that felt equal pleasure and pain, so that they would 'do' something. He figured out that by absorbing a degree of their pain the creatures felt more pleasure than pain, for a time so they lived and became active. But he had to keep them 'alive' by absorbing more and more of their pain, then when he could bear no more pain he left them inert and went with an Other that mysteriously appeared, on his way." Beautiful story. ))
The occasions when my mind operated with it's own project in mind were events that were embedded in every day life, some when I was less than 9 years old. I suspect such events happen for a reason, Jung experienced them, many authors of great books begin with an incident that happened when they were very young. Mine were very specific and they caught (or were brought to) my attention in the most subtle ways, creating a new way to relate to every aspect in my life while I struggled with certain life problems and felt literally isolated from everyone in that isolation. In that kind of isolation it's not impossible to notice there is an attempt to help, and it's all 'within'.
A hidden world emerged, but it was certainly one that caused Plato to write the Allegory of the Cave and inspired the Matrix series as well as much of our modern fantastic movies. Plato could have been more direct than using allegory perhaps except that secret keeping was essentially a device he knew would create a determination to find out what the secret is, in future generations. It (that there is a secret, really) was eventually obvious when the intensity I felt seemed to be shared by others working on the same 'project' that when I (and two small groups of other individuals in my location on this planet shared it for several years (1975-1993).
We were leaving the mainstream level literrally, learning advanced and challenge level square dancing. The mainstream dancers were not violent but we felt their outrage because gender differences were erased at that level. That made a 'fun dance' much more difficult to do, as we found out, not everyone likes to work at having fun. It's basic form is the same as the I Ching, chess, ideas of quantum physic, and certain psychological concepts, it's physically re-presentable in the moebius band, where the interaction of opposites and the interactions of similars as well as the interactions of complementary other(s) live and teach each other.
Petr D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organun, page 150-151 describes love:
"Perhaps love is a world of strange spirits who at times take up their abode in men, subduing them to themselves, making them tools for the accomplishment of their inscrutable purposes. Perhaps it is some particular region of the inner world wherein the souls of men sometimes enter, and where they live acceding to the laws of that world while their bodies remain on earth, bound by the laws of earth. It is an alchemical work of some Great Master, wherein the souls and bodies of men play the role of elements out of which is compounded a philosophers' stone, an elixir of life..."
"The philosopher is usually interested in a central idea that evolves over a long period of time, which may never be successfully completed and formulated into words , one that may appear to be mysterious and beyond scientific validation." Jean Piaget. I understand what that feels like.
I repeat this as I do other ideas that seem to need to be emphasized: From Oedipus authored by Patrick Mullahy Footnote, page 507
"Often in explaining his ideas Freud resorts to analogies or conceptions from the physical world. Another conception of his is “that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75"
It's my opinion that the 'something which should be differentiated' is an effect of the 'organ of self observation', as Swedenborg wrote in his life about a process of regeneration that occurred to him, as preparation for life after death. I don't know about that but it, (individuation/regeneration) happens in this real world, and it's not easy to get validation through science, yet. That kind of specificity in content cannot be verified easily. I've had a very rational experience, not many hallucinations were inserted, and they were always brought to my attention, eventually. That kind of inner prompting made me curious, eventually. I have never had out of body experiences such as he and Robert Monroe live, that was their life experience. But their stories made the mind and it's abilities to create it's own content and insert it into actual reality, some thing to think about. That kind of 'insertion' has happened a few times, and I've not noticed them until much later, an inner prompting brings an event to mind, and some aspect that I didn't notice is brought to my attention.
"What happened in the past is determined by what is to happen in the future." Norman O. Brown.
Monday, August 23, 2010
The Mind, it's own productions, and synchronicities.
That's a point where both 'form' and 'content' unite precisely timed into an ongoing flow of events. I found "The Bond Of Power" by Joseph Chilton Pearce quite by chance sometime in 1985 as best I can date it . I read it when I wasn't very much interested in reading anything like it, because my head felt as though it would burst but I didn't understand what the author was writing about either: "Postulates arrived full blown in the mind."? "Insight realm?" What's that? Whatever it was, that was the authors' main theme but because he mentioned Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, autism, folie aux due, in sight and William Blake often enough, I felt a vague sense of kinship as I struggled through the book. Those specific details were personally relevant to me immediately, but only vaguely. Until about 1984 I had read only fictions, a lot of fiction but the 'force of a habit' may have demanded that I read non-fictions instead when the content of the habit reversed into its opposite.
I re-read the book several years ago but by then I had learned that I'd had what he described as a 'postulate arrived full blown in the mind' myself'. I'd had it already when I read the book the first time but he was writing about 'suddenly there' implosions of information into the mind of scientists. He gave quite a number of examples of what he experienced, many unusual experiences I'd never read or thought about. But they didn't link up easily with what I had named a 'mindquake' when I did name it a few years after it happened. After a few years of reading material that literally 'boggled my mind' I felt his term applied to my 'mindquakes'. In re-reading the book, which has been reprinted under a new name recently, I noticed many mentions that I believe are worth quoting for someone else, anyone that's struggling with the changes that begin with synchronization of thought and events in the material world that this non-scientist (me) has experienced.
I know it's not delusional to experience that flow where mind, thought, material world events align perfectly for a span of years and a real purpose is at work in the individuals life. That where confusion develops because other people and what they're doing blend effortlessly into developing the parallel flow that I felt as 'second underlying contexts' when they were relevant events. That's my descriptive term for 'meaningful coincidences/synchronicities'. A Jungian analyst told me that's a perfect definition, everyday events are in a real way 're-used', 're-seen', 'echoed' but with a new meaning, in a personal context, it happens automatically, suddenly, always as a surprise.
Page 8-9, Introduction: “Carl Jung on his return from a visit to India in 1937 observed that the Hindu didn’t seem to think his thoughts as we do in the West, but perceives his thought” as though thought were ready made outside the brain and simply viewed like any sensory act. Indeed, Jung’s notion agrees with Hindu and yogic theory that thoughts are not originated in the brain but are perceived from a stream of impressions impinging on the brain. At issue here is not the merit of Western and Eastern logics but a larger definition of mental experience.
The relation of mind, grain and world is not a one-way street. Traffic moves on many levels and incorporates a surprisingly wide terrain. In sight is surely a perfect example of a level of thought not generated by our ordinary brain process. So the suggestion of a perceptual background which includes thought as one of its components is strange to us and academically suspect but is demonstrated in insight and can be experience through meditation.
Brain research indicates that new process of thought and experience open for us through synchronization of right and left hemispheres of the brain. The attempts of Eastern thought to break into Western logic on some serious level today may indicate the attempt of this thinking sphere of Earth to balance the fragmentations of technology.”
Page 79: Our idea system must be flexible enough to incorporate anything occurring in our lives, not a system ruling out large areas of possibility (such) as hallucination and illusion. A viewpoint which relates only to the explicate order and it’s “objective experience” automatically establishes a serious tyranny over the mind. Through such definitions we allow only the “merest ripple” on the surface of the holonomic movement into our lives.”
Page 136: I recall how intrigued I was, years ago with Carl Jung’s forays into “synchronicity” a pseudoscientific attempt to explain non-ordinary phenomena and the way thinking at times seemed to influence reality (so vigorously denied by academic thought). How pallid his examples and explanations seem after time around Baba. (His teacher)
As a mature female, very mature even in the early 1980's it was an almost unbelievable switch to begin to observe my own thoughts, and wonder if "I" produced all of them. There were times it seemed the planet had developed a voice but that 'voice' always had a matching content in my thought...('mirror neurons' possibly?)that preceded what the 'exterior to me' voice 'said'. There are symptoms in psychiatric texts that name this kind of 'resonation' as either ideas of reference, thought broadcasting, magical thinking (when it seems my own thought is producing effects in the world, having results!) etc.
An example may help understand what I mean. Any author of a non-fictional book gleans fragments from other authors and assembles them into his book, a fine example of which is Harold Searles Selected Essays on Schizophrenia. That's a book that came to my attention when I noticed another author cited "Driving the other person crazy" by Searles' in his bibliography. I wanted to read 'Driving the other person crazy" so I looked on the Internet and found it was in his Selected Essays on Schizophrenia. It was available for $89.50 so I put it out of my mind.
A short time later I was waiting in line to pay for a book at Barnes and Noble and I noticed a rack of books, reduced as much as 75%. Laying on top was a book, the first book that caught my attention: Selected Essays on Schizophrenia by Harold Searles, and it had been reduced 75% so bought it. Mr. Searles described many instances when he realized his patients were mocking him, 'acting out' what they perceived in him. He sensed a level of consciousness in his patient that was fully aware of information that spoke to him from deeper levels of mind.
This is basically what C. G. Jung recognized, that his patients acted out certain symptoms of their illness that they couldn't see. Or even had a 'voice' within themselves that spoke to him, words they could not hear themselves speak, and it seemed they didn't 'remember' saying. He told them what he heard them say. This is an amazingly difficult aspect of our lives, that there is such vast space in between our ears. And that our own ears do not hear nor our eyes see everything our body does.
I remember a quotation in Carl Sagan's book Contact that didn't impress me at all when I first read it:
"In her mind she thought she could hear one joyous shout amidst a clamor of other voices." Ellen Arroway had just realized that the signal they had picked up was the first contact from extra terrestrials. It seemed to me to suggest that 'amidst a clamor of other thoughts in my mind, there was 'one' that was coming to me, I was not producing it myself. It's worth investigating whether this is a common feature of 'us', we two legged uprights that carry memories of the past, in our bodies apparently, and are haunted by them.
That book was more than just a book to me, it gave me ideas that helped me to understand my first mind quake, which was a 'palimpsest' in the same way the message in the book happened. It had layers each having to be decoded before the next was available.
There are other authors such William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg who proudly recognized they were only the hand that wrote down what they received. (I don't suggest getting into Swedenborg until you've read Robert Monroe's three books in the order he wrote them.) It doesn't seem to me to be pathological thinking, or forming delusional associations between events and personal thoughts to recognize there is 'one thought voice within' that as Socrates described it long before I lived: "is the god within that tells us about our universe".
I re-read the book several years ago but by then I had learned that I'd had what he described as a 'postulate arrived full blown in the mind' myself'. I'd had it already when I read the book the first time but he was writing about 'suddenly there' implosions of information into the mind of scientists. He gave quite a number of examples of what he experienced, many unusual experiences I'd never read or thought about. But they didn't link up easily with what I had named a 'mindquake' when I did name it a few years after it happened. After a few years of reading material that literally 'boggled my mind' I felt his term applied to my 'mindquakes'. In re-reading the book, which has been reprinted under a new name recently, I noticed many mentions that I believe are worth quoting for someone else, anyone that's struggling with the changes that begin with synchronization of thought and events in the material world that this non-scientist (me) has experienced.
I know it's not delusional to experience that flow where mind, thought, material world events align perfectly for a span of years and a real purpose is at work in the individuals life. That where confusion develops because other people and what they're doing blend effortlessly into developing the parallel flow that I felt as 'second underlying contexts' when they were relevant events. That's my descriptive term for 'meaningful coincidences/synchronicities'. A Jungian analyst told me that's a perfect definition, everyday events are in a real way 're-used', 're-seen', 'echoed' but with a new meaning, in a personal context, it happens automatically, suddenly, always as a surprise.
Page 8-9, Introduction: “Carl Jung on his return from a visit to India in 1937 observed that the Hindu didn’t seem to think his thoughts as we do in the West, but perceives his thought” as though thought were ready made outside the brain and simply viewed like any sensory act. Indeed, Jung’s notion agrees with Hindu and yogic theory that thoughts are not originated in the brain but are perceived from a stream of impressions impinging on the brain. At issue here is not the merit of Western and Eastern logics but a larger definition of mental experience.
The relation of mind, grain and world is not a one-way street. Traffic moves on many levels and incorporates a surprisingly wide terrain. In sight is surely a perfect example of a level of thought not generated by our ordinary brain process. So the suggestion of a perceptual background which includes thought as one of its components is strange to us and academically suspect but is demonstrated in insight and can be experience through meditation.
Brain research indicates that new process of thought and experience open for us through synchronization of right and left hemispheres of the brain. The attempts of Eastern thought to break into Western logic on some serious level today may indicate the attempt of this thinking sphere of Earth to balance the fragmentations of technology.”
Page 79: Our idea system must be flexible enough to incorporate anything occurring in our lives, not a system ruling out large areas of possibility (such) as hallucination and illusion. A viewpoint which relates only to the explicate order and it’s “objective experience” automatically establishes a serious tyranny over the mind. Through such definitions we allow only the “merest ripple” on the surface of the holonomic movement into our lives.”
Page 136: I recall how intrigued I was, years ago with Carl Jung’s forays into “synchronicity” a pseudoscientific attempt to explain non-ordinary phenomena and the way thinking at times seemed to influence reality (so vigorously denied by academic thought). How pallid his examples and explanations seem after time around Baba. (His teacher)
As a mature female, very mature even in the early 1980's it was an almost unbelievable switch to begin to observe my own thoughts, and wonder if "I" produced all of them. There were times it seemed the planet had developed a voice but that 'voice' always had a matching content in my thought...('mirror neurons' possibly?)that preceded what the 'exterior to me' voice 'said'. There are symptoms in psychiatric texts that name this kind of 'resonation' as either ideas of reference, thought broadcasting, magical thinking (when it seems my own thought is producing effects in the world, having results!) etc.
An example may help understand what I mean. Any author of a non-fictional book gleans fragments from other authors and assembles them into his book, a fine example of which is Harold Searles Selected Essays on Schizophrenia. That's a book that came to my attention when I noticed another author cited "Driving the other person crazy" by Searles' in his bibliography. I wanted to read 'Driving the other person crazy" so I looked on the Internet and found it was in his Selected Essays on Schizophrenia. It was available for $89.50 so I put it out of my mind.
A short time later I was waiting in line to pay for a book at Barnes and Noble and I noticed a rack of books, reduced as much as 75%. Laying on top was a book, the first book that caught my attention: Selected Essays on Schizophrenia by Harold Searles, and it had been reduced 75% so bought it. Mr. Searles described many instances when he realized his patients were mocking him, 'acting out' what they perceived in him. He sensed a level of consciousness in his patient that was fully aware of information that spoke to him from deeper levels of mind.
This is basically what C. G. Jung recognized, that his patients acted out certain symptoms of their illness that they couldn't see. Or even had a 'voice' within themselves that spoke to him, words they could not hear themselves speak, and it seemed they didn't 'remember' saying. He told them what he heard them say. This is an amazingly difficult aspect of our lives, that there is such vast space in between our ears. And that our own ears do not hear nor our eyes see everything our body does.
I remember a quotation in Carl Sagan's book Contact that didn't impress me at all when I first read it:
"In her mind she thought she could hear one joyous shout amidst a clamor of other voices." Ellen Arroway had just realized that the signal they had picked up was the first contact from extra terrestrials. It seemed to me to suggest that 'amidst a clamor of other thoughts in my mind, there was 'one' that was coming to me, I was not producing it myself. It's worth investigating whether this is a common feature of 'us', we two legged uprights that carry memories of the past, in our bodies apparently, and are haunted by them.
That book was more than just a book to me, it gave me ideas that helped me to understand my first mind quake, which was a 'palimpsest' in the same way the message in the book happened. It had layers each having to be decoded before the next was available.
There are other authors such William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg who proudly recognized they were only the hand that wrote down what they received. (I don't suggest getting into Swedenborg until you've read Robert Monroe's three books in the order he wrote them.) It doesn't seem to me to be pathological thinking, or forming delusional associations between events and personal thoughts to recognize there is 'one thought voice within' that as Socrates described it long before I lived: "is the god within that tells us about our universe".
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Discovering the 'sequestered inner world', individually and uniquely guided.
"The human consciousness in addition to the function of the exploring of the outside world is burdened with the additional task of discovering the sequestered inner world." Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, pp 171
The task requires an experience of the process itself, and that includes a way to identify the mechanisms of mind that produce the results. By that I mean the acceptable proof that the individual is being related to, not collectively but as a specific person.
An example is that an inner event happened to me when I was 13 years old (1945) that was retrieved into my mind in 1984 exactly as I had originally experienced it. I had forgotten that event until it was retrieved but the significance of the retrieval did not occur to me then, as it had not in 1945. It was so unusual that it should have made a deep impression that day, but I gave no thought to it afterwards.
There are many authors who begin their book with a description of something that happened when they were very young. These early life events seem to be installed for later use, C. G. Jung described several that happened when he was young, one of the most significant (in my opinion) was when one day he imaged a giant turd falling over the church of Basel.
The term 'holy shit' might have some reference to that event, once the term is linked to Norman O. Brown's chapters in Life Against Death that are about the excremental vision of Martin Luther. I was shocked literally when I read that revelation had happened when he was 'on the privy in the tower' and that the 'internal sense' of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is quite different than the fantastic story. I read with that the excremental vision really began in a privy but it relates to a modern pattern, anal retentive, associated with toilet training, of being literally 'up tight'.
The 'internal sense' (or the hidden level of meaning similar to Swedenborgs' version of stories in the Bible) of that book is not obvious to anyone that reads it with a normal sense. I believe from my experiences that this kind of understanding requires the 'transcendental function' to create the information Mr. Brown discerned in the book. "Anal retentive" became a popular phrase at work when profits began to be the primary focus of where I worked, rather than building a product. I wondered how many people knew something of it's origin.
C. G. Jung wrote that the first half of life is preparation for the second half, and that's a statement that implies he recognized 'foresight' in his own life. His Red Book which was only recently made available to the public exposes the many levels of his own mind that he became aware of, levels that linked to the depths within the depths of not only his own mind but the collective past. He wrote the Red Book from his encounter with the voice of the spirit of his age, and the spirit of past ages and what may be the spirit of future ages.
Perhaps the mind itself has always had an eye that never sleeps, that seems likely to me. It can take a snap shot of what's happening to me and it includes what ever is in my mind, it's complete in every detail. I know that now for a fact myself but I had to discover that fact from implications of such events as happened really that made no impression until they were retrieved. The mechanisms in the mind have been somewhat named in psychiatric texts.
Those mechanisms are within the mind and from my own experiences they are part of our body now, although that might not have always been the situation. The 'transcendental function' has developed and become distinct through a span of ages, periods in Time, perhaps as our 'genetic structures', forms that create 'events' from ordinary daily situations and circumstances that the individual would normally experience without any particular way to distinguish some 'difference'.
To clarify what I mean by an 'event' rather than an event, this example happened in 1987: I was assigned to a new location in the building where I worked at Boeing and I had to walk onto a metal gridwork floor for the first time. It's a large area, tanks are embedded in it so that only 4 feet are above the gridwork floor and 12 feet are below it. Without hesitation I walked onto the floor to do my job which required I look for paperwork that was on the ledge of each tank. I'd taken several steps when suddenly I felt dizzy and had to cling to the ledge of the tank nearest me.
A few seconds passed then I realized the light in the room below the grid work floor made it nearly disappear, so I felt like I used to feel when I walked across a bridge near my grandmothers' house when we went for a walk when I was very young. The road disappeared to my childish perception, I saw the water and not the grid work so I wouldn't walk on the bridge for some time. When she carried me successfully across a few times, I managed to accept that all floors aren't solid. The memories of my past somehow produced a thought: "It's just like standing on an invisible floor. I can see what's going on around me but I can see whats going on below me too."
Then I noticed distinctly an 'effect' to the thought, that turned the direction of the words around, I had thought them, but the effect turned them around toward me, I heard them again in a bundled unit, no space between the words as though another person had said them to me. This 'effect' had come to my attention over a span of months, almost two years; it had seemed to be happening but I could not be certain until this event in my material world happened and it was distinct this time.
The words of my thought were 'reflected back' to me, they were in a very real way re-used to 'talk' to me because in the 're-use' the words told me what I was doing not only physically but mentally. I had not yet understood that a process of individuation existed, I knew nothing about a mental realm or the mind/brain/body connection to it. I was amazed (but not immediately) at how my material world thought, produced by what I was doing physically was repeated, somewhat like an echo but there were no spaces between the words. I would not have used the word echo then, that word had to occur in several other situations before it seemed to fit. There was another phrase that did occur to me somewhat distantly: double thought and I remembered having read it in a book by Wilson Van Dusen and it was a quotation from Emanuel Swedenborg's writings.
It was the first quotation I read anywhere from Emanuel Swedenborg's writings. "I feared my double thought might be torn asunder." It was a strange phrase, I remember pausing briefly over it, wondering what it could mean. I would never have suspected that at the time I read the phrase, it literally described what I had been occasionally experiencing, a doubleness not only of thought, but everything outside of my body. This change had happened in a certain specific setting at first, a few years before 1984, then it expanded to every aspect of my life, but gradually. When it happened I felt the same dizziness that I feel when I've driven into a parking slot and stopped when someone adjacent to me is pulling out. For a few seconds I feel like I'm moving myself, and I jam on the brakes.
This was such a new kind of 'event' when each event happened, that I felt that real dizziness, when my mind was detached from my normal world experiences. There were times when I wondered if I was 'thinking' my thoughts, my thought world was quite different after about 1982.
If that isn't clear enough I can refer my reader to another example of 'double thought' which I found a few years ago in Theodore Reik's book, Fragment of a Great Confession in chapter titled: In Small Packages. He described an event where his own mind seemed to hover over certain words in his thought, they developed a hidden meaning, a double bottom. He did not recognize that those particular words actually described to him a detail about his own real life, the fact that they 'hovered' in his mind forced him to 're-think' about them.
The term 'second sight' has a real meaning when the processes of individuation are activated.
The task requires an experience of the process itself, and that includes a way to identify the mechanisms of mind that produce the results. By that I mean the acceptable proof that the individual is being related to, not collectively but as a specific person.
An example is that an inner event happened to me when I was 13 years old (1945) that was retrieved into my mind in 1984 exactly as I had originally experienced it. I had forgotten that event until it was retrieved but the significance of the retrieval did not occur to me then, as it had not in 1945. It was so unusual that it should have made a deep impression that day, but I gave no thought to it afterwards.
There are many authors who begin their book with a description of something that happened when they were very young. These early life events seem to be installed for later use, C. G. Jung described several that happened when he was young, one of the most significant (in my opinion) was when one day he imaged a giant turd falling over the church of Basel.
The term 'holy shit' might have some reference to that event, once the term is linked to Norman O. Brown's chapters in Life Against Death that are about the excremental vision of Martin Luther. I was shocked literally when I read that revelation had happened when he was 'on the privy in the tower' and that the 'internal sense' of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is quite different than the fantastic story. I read with that the excremental vision really began in a privy but it relates to a modern pattern, anal retentive, associated with toilet training, of being literally 'up tight'.
The 'internal sense' (or the hidden level of meaning similar to Swedenborgs' version of stories in the Bible) of that book is not obvious to anyone that reads it with a normal sense. I believe from my experiences that this kind of understanding requires the 'transcendental function' to create the information Mr. Brown discerned in the book. "Anal retentive" became a popular phrase at work when profits began to be the primary focus of where I worked, rather than building a product. I wondered how many people knew something of it's origin.
C. G. Jung wrote that the first half of life is preparation for the second half, and that's a statement that implies he recognized 'foresight' in his own life. His Red Book which was only recently made available to the public exposes the many levels of his own mind that he became aware of, levels that linked to the depths within the depths of not only his own mind but the collective past. He wrote the Red Book from his encounter with the voice of the spirit of his age, and the spirit of past ages and what may be the spirit of future ages.
Perhaps the mind itself has always had an eye that never sleeps, that seems likely to me. It can take a snap shot of what's happening to me and it includes what ever is in my mind, it's complete in every detail. I know that now for a fact myself but I had to discover that fact from implications of such events as happened really that made no impression until they were retrieved. The mechanisms in the mind have been somewhat named in psychiatric texts.
Those mechanisms are within the mind and from my own experiences they are part of our body now, although that might not have always been the situation. The 'transcendental function' has developed and become distinct through a span of ages, periods in Time, perhaps as our 'genetic structures', forms that create 'events' from ordinary daily situations and circumstances that the individual would normally experience without any particular way to distinguish some 'difference'.
To clarify what I mean by an 'event' rather than an event, this example happened in 1987: I was assigned to a new location in the building where I worked at Boeing and I had to walk onto a metal gridwork floor for the first time. It's a large area, tanks are embedded in it so that only 4 feet are above the gridwork floor and 12 feet are below it. Without hesitation I walked onto the floor to do my job which required I look for paperwork that was on the ledge of each tank. I'd taken several steps when suddenly I felt dizzy and had to cling to the ledge of the tank nearest me.
A few seconds passed then I realized the light in the room below the grid work floor made it nearly disappear, so I felt like I used to feel when I walked across a bridge near my grandmothers' house when we went for a walk when I was very young. The road disappeared to my childish perception, I saw the water and not the grid work so I wouldn't walk on the bridge for some time. When she carried me successfully across a few times, I managed to accept that all floors aren't solid. The memories of my past somehow produced a thought: "It's just like standing on an invisible floor. I can see what's going on around me but I can see whats going on below me too."
Then I noticed distinctly an 'effect' to the thought, that turned the direction of the words around, I had thought them, but the effect turned them around toward me, I heard them again in a bundled unit, no space between the words as though another person had said them to me. This 'effect' had come to my attention over a span of months, almost two years; it had seemed to be happening but I could not be certain until this event in my material world happened and it was distinct this time.
The words of my thought were 'reflected back' to me, they were in a very real way re-used to 'talk' to me because in the 're-use' the words told me what I was doing not only physically but mentally. I had not yet understood that a process of individuation existed, I knew nothing about a mental realm or the mind/brain/body connection to it. I was amazed (but not immediately) at how my material world thought, produced by what I was doing physically was repeated, somewhat like an echo but there were no spaces between the words. I would not have used the word echo then, that word had to occur in several other situations before it seemed to fit. There was another phrase that did occur to me somewhat distantly: double thought and I remembered having read it in a book by Wilson Van Dusen and it was a quotation from Emanuel Swedenborg's writings.
It was the first quotation I read anywhere from Emanuel Swedenborg's writings. "I feared my double thought might be torn asunder." It was a strange phrase, I remember pausing briefly over it, wondering what it could mean. I would never have suspected that at the time I read the phrase, it literally described what I had been occasionally experiencing, a doubleness not only of thought, but everything outside of my body. This change had happened in a certain specific setting at first, a few years before 1984, then it expanded to every aspect of my life, but gradually. When it happened I felt the same dizziness that I feel when I've driven into a parking slot and stopped when someone adjacent to me is pulling out. For a few seconds I feel like I'm moving myself, and I jam on the brakes.
This was such a new kind of 'event' when each event happened, that I felt that real dizziness, when my mind was detached from my normal world experiences. There were times when I wondered if I was 'thinking' my thoughts, my thought world was quite different after about 1982.
If that isn't clear enough I can refer my reader to another example of 'double thought' which I found a few years ago in Theodore Reik's book, Fragment of a Great Confession in chapter titled: In Small Packages. He described an event where his own mind seemed to hover over certain words in his thought, they developed a hidden meaning, a double bottom. He did not recognize that those particular words actually described to him a detail about his own real life, the fact that they 'hovered' in his mind forced him to 're-think' about them.
The term 'second sight' has a real meaning when the processes of individuation are activated.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
The Amazing Martin Gardner. revised 6-15-2010
This was intended to be a short post because I wanted to write something about Martin Gardner, who has just left us. I didn't know anything about him when I spotted The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix in 1993 and bought it because it had some interesting puzzles on the jacket. As I read the book I experienced a bundle of the most unexplainable synchronizations between what he wrote as Dr. Matrix in the book and some experiences I'd had. I called him and asked if I could write to him and being the open hearted man he was he told me he'd like to hear from me. We exchanged a few letters afterwards but its not like we got to be chums though.
I can't think of the exact words I'd like to use to describe how I felt about him, but coincidentally I just read them in a book I'm reading: Many Dimensions by Charles Williams. He can write the kind of words I wish I could. Here they are although they are about a character in the book because immediately after reading them a thought occurred to me that they described the Martin Gardner that offered to communicate with a 'crank'. Until I got a letter from him I didn't know what a 'crank' is!!! And I didn't know about 'numerology' either!!!
"But Lord Arglay,(Martin Gardner) at once in contact and detached, at once faithless and believing, beheld all these things in the light of that fastidiousness and ironical good will which, outside of mystical experience, is the finest and noblest capacity man has developed in and against the universe.
I've never read a more concise description of a person that has learned to live between the 'interaction of opposites'Those words describe how I see Martin Gardner, as I experienced him; he was a poised point of view between opposites writing from a uniquely unsophisticated way of seeing relationships and patterns that others' wouldn't know about unless he made his observations public. As I mentioned already I chanced to spot The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix and was interested in the puzzles on the cover, then I read the book not realizing Dr. Matrix was a fictional man. I'd never heard of Martin Gardner so I didn't know who I was writing to, and he didn't get mad when he read my letter. He did get a bit perturbed when I mentioned Jung, Swedenborg and synchronicity, just a bit.
It seemed to me that the language of whatever the 'zeitgiest' really is happened to both of us, 'it' used both of us when just by chance I noticed some puzzles on the jacket of The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix and a mild curiosity caused me to buy the book. On the jacket liner Mr. Gardner said that the name of HAL the computer in 2001 Space Odessey is one letter behind IBM in the alphabet. That's quite a coincidence! He apparently asked Arthur C. Clarke if that was an intentional choice and it was emphatically stated that it was not. They were both skeptics but it seems to me Mr. Gardner hesitated to be totally skeptical about whether we are alone in the universe. If there is a God, we are not alone in the universe. He left that door open.
An almost unbelievable bundle of 'coincidences' happened when I read the vignettes by Dr. Matrix about patterns in pi, 3.1415926535... that caused me to call him, then write a letter, then go back to reading the book, then read another vignette a 'hidden order' in the numbers: 8549176320. I saw my mind operate on those numbers and produce a detail about my life that I wouldn't have recognized. The events bundled to produce a single event that could have been 'chance' but probably was not.
I've been attempting to explain 'synchronicity' the way F. David Peat somewhat described it, as an 'interactive force'. However he did not identify the 'force' with a process in life, an individuation process that C. G. Jung named 'individuationn'. I had come to believe Jung was obviously influenced by having read Swedenborg, who used the name 'regeneration' for the same process. That's my opinion but I wouldn't suggest reading Swedenborg until AFTER reading Robert Monroes' three books, in their order: Journey's out of Body; Far Journeys; Ultimate Journey. Ultimate Journey is a real surprise but it prepared me for reading about Swedenborg's description of what he experienced at times, when he was 'yet in my bed'.
Mr. Gardner was no believer in Jung, Koestler, or Swedenborg as he informed me when he answered my letter to him, all of whom I mentioned in my attempt to describe to him the synchronization between the different vignettes in his book and events in my past.
I'd had extra ordinary experiences with pi. Not the least of which is that after 2-11-85 , I worked for Boeing in the Fabrication Division in Auburn, Washington and there's a model of the pi symbol in their courtyard. In 1989 I'd had what I named for lack of a better word, a 'pi quake' that revealed a hidden pattern in the first 10 numbers in pi: 3141592653... . If 14, 1 5, 92, are 'cross summed', the result is: 356 2 653..., the numbers mirror from the center outwards, but that's just a part of what was revealed in a flash when the mindquake followed, at first glance. Time was different then. I didn't look for anything when I glanced at the back of Petr Beckmann's History Of Pi and saw 10,000 of 100,265 decimals that had been calculated in 1962.
The History of Pi is a book I read only because I worked for Boeing and it used to be their 'pride in excellence' award program logo: PIE. An unexpected mass of information that I realized nobody else would every understand was revealed when I glanced at the first rectangle of decimals in the back of Petr Beckman's History of Pi.
I had just read the copyright statement, then paused to wonder why 100,265 decimals had been calculated rather than a nice round number like 100,000. Then I turned the page back and noticed 265 in the first 10 decimals, and then.... a sudden extremely rapid slide show-like shifting of numbers revealed patterns and relationships that I knew immediately could only be recognized by me, with my particular habits, memories and especially my experiences in life. The number 651 was everywhere, explicitly and coded, that was nothing I looked for but a habit I'd had since I was 9 years old was obviously what created these relationships, where 14 = 5; 15 = 6. 651 was familiar to me. That number and permutations of 256/651 had begun to come to my attention strangely over a span of years after I bought a 1979 Datsun 210 that was already tabbed as ETW 651. At first glance ETW generated Extra Terrestrial Woman, to my amusement, as spontaneously as BYOB produces 'bring your own bottle'. It seemed likely Mr. Gardner's mind worked naturally that way, he had 'mindquakes' all the time.
The kind of 'quake' that I experienced just happens, I can't make them happen and they are always unexpected but what makes them 'strange' is that they generate information that shakes up my world view, exposing something that was hidden. They were perhaps normal every day events to Mr. Gardner because I had become aware that "what you get used to gets to be normal". To me they were not frequent events.
It began when I read the vignette on page 59 about a 'curious reflection in pi' then called him, then read further in the book. On page 72-73 Dr. Matrix tells about a 'woman named Betty who had a compulsion to put things in order, who was the first person to guess what the hidden order was in these 10 numbers: 8549176320'. That was a bit of surprise to me because I'd just written about a hidden order in 10 numbers: 3141592653... , my name is Betty and at the time I was driven by a need to put things in order, but I'm not talking about housekeeping. I was trying to figure things out, and they were not material things.
When I glanced at 8549176320 I couldn't guess what the hidden order was but as I looked at the numbers, I 'saw' 917 slip directly below 854 and I recognized 8547198, my telephone number. Read 854 then down to 719 then up to 8, we'd had the number for a decade by then. 1-2-3 sum to 6, they are the numbers in my birth day/year (1-02-32) and obviously 0 was my point of origin.
Thus 8549176320 was information about me, very specifically. I didn't look for or expect to see that. The kind of 'seeing' that happened to expose my phone number is depicted in Mercury Rising, in a scene where an autistic boy looks at a puzzle, the numbers shift around then he goes to the phone , dials a number then says: "You are a Stranger." A hidden message had been revealed, he recognized the message and made a phone call that wasn't supposed to ever be made. The movie gave me an idea because until computers wre so much a part of every day life I had no prior sense of what a 'slide show' was. The scened in the movie was very similar to what happened to me. Habits I've had since I was 9 years old made the slide show happen. That kind of mental activity, visible and unwilled may be an explanation for how Mr. Gardner 'saw' as Dr. Matrix.
II couldn't see the 'hidden order' in the 10 numbers so had to look in the answers at the back of the book. I didn't see the hidden order in 8549176320. I couldn't see that the numbers were arranged alphabetically the way they are spelled. eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, three,two, zero. But I did 'see' that after my phone number, 854 7198, the number 6 is the sum of the 1,2,3, the numbers in my birthdate, 32 is the year I was born and 0 was my point of origin. I had observed my hand write a poem about zero as a point of origin one day when I was at work. The 'interactive force' had certain been involved in how that poem was written but thats' another topic, observing one's body from a 'once removed' perspective.
When I read the above paragraph in Williams book, I was sitting by my window, alternately watching the torrents of rain and reading the book. Charles Williams can create scenes with words that carry as much information as a mathematical formula. It's just a different kind of information. Martin Gardner was very different, but he produced an 'effect' in his own style, that's obvious. So many other people felt something from reading his books but I'm no mathematician. When I told a co-worker about the sequence of events, he suggested I read The Ambidextrous Universe. also by Martin Gardner and that was a different kind of coincidence too. Reading words must in some way affect the mind, and even 'feed' the mind. freeing up some kind of information that's 'bound up' until it meets its exact match.
Some information can't be conveyed directly, I'm not the first or only one to find out that body experiences are where education about reality happens, but reading some of Martin Gardner's books triggered many such events. The Ambidextrous Universe, The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix were great works, written by a man that could write about how opposites are necessary to point towards that which is invisible, but which creates them.
I can't think of the exact words I'd like to use to describe how I felt about him, but coincidentally I just read them in a book I'm reading: Many Dimensions by Charles Williams. He can write the kind of words I wish I could. Here they are although they are about a character in the book because immediately after reading them a thought occurred to me that they described the Martin Gardner that offered to communicate with a 'crank'. Until I got a letter from him I didn't know what a 'crank' is!!! And I didn't know about 'numerology' either!!!
"But Lord Arglay,(Martin Gardner) at once in contact and detached, at once faithless and believing, beheld all these things in the light of that fastidiousness and ironical good will which, outside of mystical experience, is the finest and noblest capacity man has developed in and against the universe.
I've never read a more concise description of a person that has learned to live between the 'interaction of opposites'Those words describe how I see Martin Gardner, as I experienced him; he was a poised point of view between opposites writing from a uniquely unsophisticated way of seeing relationships and patterns that others' wouldn't know about unless he made his observations public. As I mentioned already I chanced to spot The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix and was interested in the puzzles on the cover, then I read the book not realizing Dr. Matrix was a fictional man. I'd never heard of Martin Gardner so I didn't know who I was writing to, and he didn't get mad when he read my letter. He did get a bit perturbed when I mentioned Jung, Swedenborg and synchronicity, just a bit.
It seemed to me that the language of whatever the 'zeitgiest' really is happened to both of us, 'it' used both of us when just by chance I noticed some puzzles on the jacket of The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix and a mild curiosity caused me to buy the book. On the jacket liner Mr. Gardner said that the name of HAL the computer in 2001 Space Odessey is one letter behind IBM in the alphabet. That's quite a coincidence! He apparently asked Arthur C. Clarke if that was an intentional choice and it was emphatically stated that it was not. They were both skeptics but it seems to me Mr. Gardner hesitated to be totally skeptical about whether we are alone in the universe. If there is a God, we are not alone in the universe. He left that door open.
An almost unbelievable bundle of 'coincidences' happened when I read the vignettes by Dr. Matrix about patterns in pi, 3.1415926535... that caused me to call him, then write a letter, then go back to reading the book, then read another vignette a 'hidden order' in the numbers: 8549176320. I saw my mind operate on those numbers and produce a detail about my life that I wouldn't have recognized. The events bundled to produce a single event that could have been 'chance' but probably was not.
I've been attempting to explain 'synchronicity' the way F. David Peat somewhat described it, as an 'interactive force'. However he did not identify the 'force' with a process in life, an individuation process that C. G. Jung named 'individuationn'. I had come to believe Jung was obviously influenced by having read Swedenborg, who used the name 'regeneration' for the same process. That's my opinion but I wouldn't suggest reading Swedenborg until AFTER reading Robert Monroes' three books, in their order: Journey's out of Body; Far Journeys; Ultimate Journey. Ultimate Journey is a real surprise but it prepared me for reading about Swedenborg's description of what he experienced at times, when he was 'yet in my bed'.
Mr. Gardner was no believer in Jung, Koestler, or Swedenborg as he informed me when he answered my letter to him, all of whom I mentioned in my attempt to describe to him the synchronization between the different vignettes in his book and events in my past.
I'd had extra ordinary experiences with pi. Not the least of which is that after 2-11-85 , I worked for Boeing in the Fabrication Division in Auburn, Washington and there's a model of the pi symbol in their courtyard. In 1989 I'd had what I named for lack of a better word, a 'pi quake' that revealed a hidden pattern in the first 10 numbers in pi: 3141592653... . If 14, 1 5, 92, are 'cross summed', the result is: 356 2 653..., the numbers mirror from the center outwards, but that's just a part of what was revealed in a flash when the mindquake followed, at first glance. Time was different then. I didn't look for anything when I glanced at the back of Petr Beckmann's History Of Pi and saw 10,000 of 100,265 decimals that had been calculated in 1962.
The History of Pi is a book I read only because I worked for Boeing and it used to be their 'pride in excellence' award program logo: PIE. An unexpected mass of information that I realized nobody else would every understand was revealed when I glanced at the first rectangle of decimals in the back of Petr Beckman's History of Pi.
I had just read the copyright statement, then paused to wonder why 100,265 decimals had been calculated rather than a nice round number like 100,000. Then I turned the page back and noticed 265 in the first 10 decimals, and then.... a sudden extremely rapid slide show-like shifting of numbers revealed patterns and relationships that I knew immediately could only be recognized by me, with my particular habits, memories and especially my experiences in life. The number 651 was everywhere, explicitly and coded, that was nothing I looked for but a habit I'd had since I was 9 years old was obviously what created these relationships, where 14 = 5; 15 = 6. 651 was familiar to me. That number and permutations of 256/651 had begun to come to my attention strangely over a span of years after I bought a 1979 Datsun 210 that was already tabbed as ETW 651. At first glance ETW generated Extra Terrestrial Woman, to my amusement, as spontaneously as BYOB produces 'bring your own bottle'. It seemed likely Mr. Gardner's mind worked naturally that way, he had 'mindquakes' all the time.
The kind of 'quake' that I experienced just happens, I can't make them happen and they are always unexpected but what makes them 'strange' is that they generate information that shakes up my world view, exposing something that was hidden. They were perhaps normal every day events to Mr. Gardner because I had become aware that "what you get used to gets to be normal". To me they were not frequent events.
It began when I read the vignette on page 59 about a 'curious reflection in pi' then called him, then read further in the book. On page 72-73 Dr. Matrix tells about a 'woman named Betty who had a compulsion to put things in order, who was the first person to guess what the hidden order was in these 10 numbers: 8549176320'. That was a bit of surprise to me because I'd just written about a hidden order in 10 numbers: 3141592653... , my name is Betty and at the time I was driven by a need to put things in order, but I'm not talking about housekeeping. I was trying to figure things out, and they were not material things.
When I glanced at 8549176320 I couldn't guess what the hidden order was but as I looked at the numbers, I 'saw' 917 slip directly below 854 and I recognized 8547198, my telephone number. Read 854 then down to 719 then up to 8, we'd had the number for a decade by then. 1-2-3 sum to 6, they are the numbers in my birth day/year (1-02-32) and obviously 0 was my point of origin.
Thus 8549176320 was information about me, very specifically. I didn't look for or expect to see that. The kind of 'seeing' that happened to expose my phone number is depicted in Mercury Rising, in a scene where an autistic boy looks at a puzzle, the numbers shift around then he goes to the phone , dials a number then says: "You are a Stranger." A hidden message had been revealed, he recognized the message and made a phone call that wasn't supposed to ever be made. The movie gave me an idea because until computers wre so much a part of every day life I had no prior sense of what a 'slide show' was. The scened in the movie was very similar to what happened to me. Habits I've had since I was 9 years old made the slide show happen. That kind of mental activity, visible and unwilled may be an explanation for how Mr. Gardner 'saw' as Dr. Matrix.
II couldn't see the 'hidden order' in the 10 numbers so had to look in the answers at the back of the book. I didn't see the hidden order in 8549176320. I couldn't see that the numbers were arranged alphabetically the way they are spelled. eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, three,two, zero. But I did 'see' that after my phone number, 854 7198, the number 6 is the sum of the 1,2,3, the numbers in my birthdate, 32 is the year I was born and 0 was my point of origin. I had observed my hand write a poem about zero as a point of origin one day when I was at work. The 'interactive force' had certain been involved in how that poem was written but thats' another topic, observing one's body from a 'once removed' perspective.
When I read the above paragraph in Williams book, I was sitting by my window, alternately watching the torrents of rain and reading the book. Charles Williams can create scenes with words that carry as much information as a mathematical formula. It's just a different kind of information. Martin Gardner was very different, but he produced an 'effect' in his own style, that's obvious. So many other people felt something from reading his books but I'm no mathematician. When I told a co-worker about the sequence of events, he suggested I read The Ambidextrous Universe. also by Martin Gardner and that was a different kind of coincidence too. Reading words must in some way affect the mind, and even 'feed' the mind. freeing up some kind of information that's 'bound up' until it meets its exact match.
Some information can't be conveyed directly, I'm not the first or only one to find out that body experiences are where education about reality happens, but reading some of Martin Gardner's books triggered many such events. The Ambidextrous Universe, The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix were great works, written by a man that could write about how opposites are necessary to point towards that which is invisible, but which creates them.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thinking the unthinkable, amended 6-4-2010
"The human consciousness in addition to the function of the exploring of the outside world is burdened with the additional task of discovering the sequestered inner world." Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, pp 171
The purpose of this post is to describe an Event that happened about 22 years ago after I closed a book I'd just finished reading: The Lord of Thought, it's an old book by Emmett and Dougall. I don't remember where I found it. I was reading almost constantly, books that caught my attention in various ways at garage sales, swap meets, and only occasionally (thank heavens) by dropping in front of me, open to a certain page.
The authors purpose was to isolate the differences between the life of Jesus and ordinary men. "What was unique about that life?", was the question the authors tried to answer.
After reading the last page, closing the book an 'event' happened that produced in my mind ideas and information that was to me, unthinkable because the ideas were all ultimate heresy. They had very little to do with religion as its generally put before us. The result of the 'event' overall was that religion is about whether we are alone in the universe. I had never thought such a thought. I felt a kind of terror at how unthinkable the ideas were; how unspeakable they were, literally. The authors had not written any of the ideas that bloomed in my mind, yet they all seemed obviously true, but unspeakable for many reasons, one of which was literally that when this 'event' happened I was unable to articulate or write about content in my thought as I do now. I discovered space in the mind by having to reach the point where I could relate 'now' to what was really in my thought, when it emerged. That kind of distance is not possible to see, it has to be experienced. I was in pure experience when I had the impulse to read The Lord of Thought.
I had the sense I didn't 'think' that information, or create those ideas; they were given to me, they flooded into my thought world.
The influx (that's Swedenborg's term but it fits) of ideas began with the authors primary idea of identifying what was unique but they had not mentioned any of the literally shocking ideas that came into my mind. The 'net effects' of that life were not primary to the authors but to me they were. His life had several unique facts that I"d not thought about, only one of which was that it had inserted a universal 'zero' in Time on this planet. He had known the future many times. But he also knew the past. And only that one life distinctly related to a 'kingdom of heaven which is within you'.
The one very unique difference in his life was that he and no other religious personality that I knew about had made a distinct reference to a 'father in heaven' and a 'heaven which is within 'you'. You is a plural and singular word.
His last words "It is accomplished." were aligned with many facts that are obvious now but in 1988 were not. The planet is now zero in space, a kind of 'Cartesian point' in space from which we were beginning to explore space. The International Space Station was a reality, which seemed strangely linked to that point when "It is accomplished." was spoken; it referenced a future event that was now possible. The idea that when Stonehenge was new, there was a purpose at work, a plan was initiated and a goal was established for an event to happen far ahead in Time. It was somewhat possible for almost anyone, even me to realize by then that Time is variable.
We had begun to experience in life not in words written in a book, the apparently infinite space between one second and the next in computer speeds; contact with extra terrestrials was linked to 'the heaven within you' in my mind and that alone was terrifying and bizarrely simplistic.
There were several unspeakable ideas in that influx, primarily associating that life with many other 'net effects'. But the 'kingdom of heaven is within you'. was the most distinct and literal.
When I saw Field of Dreams almost a decade later the idea occurred to me that the way the corn field seemed to talk in the film could have been how the snake in the garden of Eden had seemed to talk and I'd had many experiences involving 'projection' in the phase where it is exteriorized perception. I had experienced that there's a faculty of mind that 'projects' inner content outwards to the material world but it's a phase on a continuum where there are points of change. It's a kind of self self observation that is somewhat distinct. That mechanism had become one I knew about from experiences in my life, and from people I knew. That was an additional level of heresy, to believe that the mechanism of projection was depicted in the Bible in many other stories. "Let him that hath an ear, listen to what the spirit sayeth unto the churches." The spirit talks to the churches, all of them.
I was unable to believe "I" thought that event; it was a happening to me. It was not the only kind of 'event' I was trying to understand at that point. The authors had not written anything about the ideas that poured into my mind so suddenly, as though timed to happen just when I closed the book.
It's not easy to describe how many times my 'thought' has been altered by changes that 'color' what I hear, what I see outside my body and even how my own thought was 'turned around' and experienced as being 'said' to me, not created by me but I'll have to try to do that. Time and different levels in the mind don't announce themselves, certain subtle relationships have to be noticed. I had experienced a very few events where it seemed Time was slowed down and a couple where Time was extremely rapid in comparison to 'normal'. That was difficult to notice but it became obvious that a symptom I'd read about, 'racing thought' doesn't really race. That particular content can't be retrieved in memory after it moves through the mind. That was an unexpected fact that some perhaps most thought content was so far from speech.
Swedenborg's remarks about 'thought nearest to speech' and 'thought that falls into speech' were clues when I read them. But I was driven by a kind of motor that focused my attention on trying to capture and hold one word of certain thought in my mind long enough to write it down. I learned about distance in my mind from that task. It was a task that carried it's own motor that drove me to do that but some toddlers I've known seem to have been driven in the same way.
I realized that certain thought is galaxies away from words that can be spoken when I felt driven to 'capture and remember' one word of certain thought for at least a year. There is also content that can be written more easily, spontaneously, without intentions from me. That kind of event has happened more frequently.
I used to be 'thought' less, and I mean literally my head was basically 'empty' until a distinct point in time that scrolled throughTime, as late in 1981, at Christmas. That's about when I became 'thought' full. I don't dream the kind of dreams many people seem to have, but one night I had a dream unlike any dream I'd ever had and after the dream, thought about that dream scrolled relentlessly through my mind. I knew nothing about 'interpretation of dreams' at the time and for several years afterwards. What happened in the dream had seemed real, yet I knew I was dreaming and I even 'thought' within the dream while it happened. I remembered the dream and my mind was different after the dream.
I noticed a change like that, obviously. I couldn't ignore it because the stream of thought about one person in the dream never stopped and I couldn't sleep at night. Anyone would notice a change that prevented going to sleep at night, not waking up rested, refreshed from the darkness or where ever we go when we really sleep.
At first I was curious and wondered how my mind seemed to produce an endless stream of thought about only one aspect of the dream: one person in the dream.
My point is that I had not paid much attention to what happened in my mind until that change re-directed my attention so drastically from what was outside my body, to what was in my head. I would not have suspected there was inner territory and that the 'flora and fauna' as well as mechanisms of mind that are visible, 'live' there in the inscape. I had no words for what I saw or how the change altered what was outside my body. It was about that point in time as I found out later, that 'right/left' brain essays began to appear in magazines and books. I believed I had brain damage from a blow on the head in an accident.
After that initiatory change others kinds of thought seeped into my mind and I wondered at times if I 'thought' my own thought. I couldn't catch 'me', thinking this thought which I was listening to now in a different way, seeing in a different way that aroused an intense curiosity eventually. I chanced to read a book by William Glasser, Stations of the Mind that introduced me to the idea that there's a part of me that 'pre-views' reality and seeks to preserve my comfortable state, that was a truly new idea to me then. The Fourth Way which introduced me to the fact there are different "I"s within but reading that kind of information is not enough to understand it. I was watching my mind without knowing it after the dream. When I read The Lord of Thought I had begun to see certain events happened as though they were timed perfectly to happen, but I was not doing the planning.
One new kind of thought addressed me the way another person would do, plural, second person thought suggestions is the best definition I can find. "We should..."; "You could..."; Let's ...."; "We could...."; That lkind of 'thought' was so distinctly new to me that I can honestly write that my own thought was now an object, to be looked at, understood the way a foxglove that was unlike any that I'd ever seen before that I found growing in my pasture in 1989 inspired me to think about it.
The word 'spirituality' did not seem an appropriate word to use when thoughts about my own thought and objects in the outer world began to coalesce, to blend and create a new understanding, parallel to my 'normal' understanding.
I don't have a better word yet, but I'm thinking about that.
The purpose of this post is to describe an Event that happened about 22 years ago after I closed a book I'd just finished reading: The Lord of Thought, it's an old book by Emmett and Dougall. I don't remember where I found it. I was reading almost constantly, books that caught my attention in various ways at garage sales, swap meets, and only occasionally (thank heavens) by dropping in front of me, open to a certain page.
The authors purpose was to isolate the differences between the life of Jesus and ordinary men. "What was unique about that life?", was the question the authors tried to answer.
After reading the last page, closing the book an 'event' happened that produced in my mind ideas and information that was to me, unthinkable because the ideas were all ultimate heresy. They had very little to do with religion as its generally put before us. The result of the 'event' overall was that religion is about whether we are alone in the universe. I had never thought such a thought. I felt a kind of terror at how unthinkable the ideas were; how unspeakable they were, literally. The authors had not written any of the ideas that bloomed in my mind, yet they all seemed obviously true, but unspeakable for many reasons, one of which was literally that when this 'event' happened I was unable to articulate or write about content in my thought as I do now. I discovered space in the mind by having to reach the point where I could relate 'now' to what was really in my thought, when it emerged. That kind of distance is not possible to see, it has to be experienced. I was in pure experience when I had the impulse to read The Lord of Thought.
I had the sense I didn't 'think' that information, or create those ideas; they were given to me, they flooded into my thought world.
The influx (that's Swedenborg's term but it fits) of ideas began with the authors primary idea of identifying what was unique but they had not mentioned any of the literally shocking ideas that came into my mind. The 'net effects' of that life were not primary to the authors but to me they were. His life had several unique facts that I"d not thought about, only one of which was that it had inserted a universal 'zero' in Time on this planet. He had known the future many times. But he also knew the past. And only that one life distinctly related to a 'kingdom of heaven which is within you'.
The one very unique difference in his life was that he and no other religious personality that I knew about had made a distinct reference to a 'father in heaven' and a 'heaven which is within 'you'. You is a plural and singular word.
His last words "It is accomplished." were aligned with many facts that are obvious now but in 1988 were not. The planet is now zero in space, a kind of 'Cartesian point' in space from which we were beginning to explore space. The International Space Station was a reality, which seemed strangely linked to that point when "It is accomplished." was spoken; it referenced a future event that was now possible. The idea that when Stonehenge was new, there was a purpose at work, a plan was initiated and a goal was established for an event to happen far ahead in Time. It was somewhat possible for almost anyone, even me to realize by then that Time is variable.
We had begun to experience in life not in words written in a book, the apparently infinite space between one second and the next in computer speeds; contact with extra terrestrials was linked to 'the heaven within you' in my mind and that alone was terrifying and bizarrely simplistic.
There were several unspeakable ideas in that influx, primarily associating that life with many other 'net effects'. But the 'kingdom of heaven is within you'. was the most distinct and literal.
When I saw Field of Dreams almost a decade later the idea occurred to me that the way the corn field seemed to talk in the film could have been how the snake in the garden of Eden had seemed to talk and I'd had many experiences involving 'projection' in the phase where it is exteriorized perception. I had experienced that there's a faculty of mind that 'projects' inner content outwards to the material world but it's a phase on a continuum where there are points of change. It's a kind of self self observation that is somewhat distinct. That mechanism had become one I knew about from experiences in my life, and from people I knew. That was an additional level of heresy, to believe that the mechanism of projection was depicted in the Bible in many other stories. "Let him that hath an ear, listen to what the spirit sayeth unto the churches." The spirit talks to the churches, all of them.
I was unable to believe "I" thought that event; it was a happening to me. It was not the only kind of 'event' I was trying to understand at that point. The authors had not written anything about the ideas that poured into my mind so suddenly, as though timed to happen just when I closed the book.
It's not easy to describe how many times my 'thought' has been altered by changes that 'color' what I hear, what I see outside my body and even how my own thought was 'turned around' and experienced as being 'said' to me, not created by me but I'll have to try to do that. Time and different levels in the mind don't announce themselves, certain subtle relationships have to be noticed. I had experienced a very few events where it seemed Time was slowed down and a couple where Time was extremely rapid in comparison to 'normal'. That was difficult to notice but it became obvious that a symptom I'd read about, 'racing thought' doesn't really race. That particular content can't be retrieved in memory after it moves through the mind. That was an unexpected fact that some perhaps most thought content was so far from speech.
Swedenborg's remarks about 'thought nearest to speech' and 'thought that falls into speech' were clues when I read them. But I was driven by a kind of motor that focused my attention on trying to capture and hold one word of certain thought in my mind long enough to write it down. I learned about distance in my mind from that task. It was a task that carried it's own motor that drove me to do that but some toddlers I've known seem to have been driven in the same way.
I realized that certain thought is galaxies away from words that can be spoken when I felt driven to 'capture and remember' one word of certain thought for at least a year. There is also content that can be written more easily, spontaneously, without intentions from me. That kind of event has happened more frequently.
I used to be 'thought' less, and I mean literally my head was basically 'empty' until a distinct point in time that scrolled throughTime, as late in 1981, at Christmas. That's about when I became 'thought' full. I don't dream the kind of dreams many people seem to have, but one night I had a dream unlike any dream I'd ever had and after the dream, thought about that dream scrolled relentlessly through my mind. I knew nothing about 'interpretation of dreams' at the time and for several years afterwards. What happened in the dream had seemed real, yet I knew I was dreaming and I even 'thought' within the dream while it happened. I remembered the dream and my mind was different after the dream.
I noticed a change like that, obviously. I couldn't ignore it because the stream of thought about one person in the dream never stopped and I couldn't sleep at night. Anyone would notice a change that prevented going to sleep at night, not waking up rested, refreshed from the darkness or where ever we go when we really sleep.
At first I was curious and wondered how my mind seemed to produce an endless stream of thought about only one aspect of the dream: one person in the dream.
My point is that I had not paid much attention to what happened in my mind until that change re-directed my attention so drastically from what was outside my body, to what was in my head. I would not have suspected there was inner territory and that the 'flora and fauna' as well as mechanisms of mind that are visible, 'live' there in the inscape. I had no words for what I saw or how the change altered what was outside my body. It was about that point in time as I found out later, that 'right/left' brain essays began to appear in magazines and books. I believed I had brain damage from a blow on the head in an accident.
After that initiatory change others kinds of thought seeped into my mind and I wondered at times if I 'thought' my own thought. I couldn't catch 'me', thinking this thought which I was listening to now in a different way, seeing in a different way that aroused an intense curiosity eventually. I chanced to read a book by William Glasser, Stations of the Mind that introduced me to the idea that there's a part of me that 'pre-views' reality and seeks to preserve my comfortable state, that was a truly new idea to me then. The Fourth Way which introduced me to the fact there are different "I"s within but reading that kind of information is not enough to understand it. I was watching my mind without knowing it after the dream. When I read The Lord of Thought I had begun to see certain events happened as though they were timed perfectly to happen, but I was not doing the planning.
One new kind of thought addressed me the way another person would do, plural, second person thought suggestions is the best definition I can find. "We should..."; "You could..."; Let's ...."; "We could...."; That lkind of 'thought' was so distinctly new to me that I can honestly write that my own thought was now an object, to be looked at, understood the way a foxglove that was unlike any that I'd ever seen before that I found growing in my pasture in 1989 inspired me to think about it.
The word 'spirituality' did not seem an appropriate word to use when thoughts about my own thought and objects in the outer world began to coalesce, to blend and create a new understanding, parallel to my 'normal' understanding.
I don't have a better word yet, but I'm thinking about that.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The Transcendental Function defined:
Freud described it very well, but I didn't read his definition until a few months ago! It's about language. It creates information, it is very likely what F. David Peat described is an 'interactive force'. I have to be cautious about saying it 'is' anything specific, but it does create unique specificity in an individual life.
When I read Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Mind and Matter in 1989, I noticed as I read the book, a sense of familiarity, of knowing already what he wrote about, from a non-mathematical viewpoint. As I read I remember a thought occurred: "The heart of and the bottom line of quantum physics is hearts desire." When I understood that thought comment I realized it was statement about particles and waves but it includes the importance of an observer, a witness, a recorder, some body that sees and can remember.
I read the book before I knew anything about particles and waves and the importance of an observer. The thought formed as though some alert part of my mind had something to say to me, in a language it knew but I barely had begun to suspect existed.
I think of myself as a recorder of some events in my past now, a selection of events that I noticed and remembered as a result of the transcendental function doing its work.
All language is not actual words, it has to become words at some point but in the beginning there are no words that convey the information that arises from so called 'coincidences' (such as reading F. David Peats book when I read it, just when that information 'resonated within me') when they are recognizable. Individual events are recognizable. Strings of related events are not. F. David Peat wrote that book, Paul Davies wrote Other Worlds, Wilson van Dusen wrote The Presence of Other Worlds and The Natural Depths of Man, Herman Hesse wrote Steppenwolfe and after reading those books myself, there was an understanding of "The heart of and the bottom line of quantum physics is 'hearts desire'. Hearts desire is what the transcendental function works with.
About language P. D. Ouspensky says better than I can say it: "It must be admitted that language is a weak and inadequate vehicle even for the expression of our usual understanding of things, to say nothing of those moments when the understanding unexpectedly expands and becomes deeper, and we see revealed an entire series of facts and relations for the description of which we have neither words nor expressions. But quite aside from this, in ordinary conditions of thinking and feeling, we are frequently at a loss for words, and we use one word at different times to describe different things"
"No study of occult philosophy is possible without an acquaintance with symbolism, for if the words occultism and symbolism are correctly used, they mean almost one and the same thing. Symbolism cannot be learned as one learns to build bridges or speak a foreign language, and for the interpretation of symbols a special cast of mind is necessary; in addition to knowledge, special faculties, the power of creative thought and a developed imagination are required. One who understands the use of symbolism in the arts, knows, in a general way, what is meant by occult symbolism.
But even then a special training of the mind is necessary, in order to comprehend the "language of the Initiates", and to express in this language the intuitions as they arise.There are many methods for developing the "sense of symbols" in those who are striving to understand the hidden forces of Nature and Man, and for teaching the fundamental principles as well as the elements of the esoteric language. The most synthetic, and one of the most interesting of these methods, is the Tarot"
(The word 'synthetic' is intended to be understood as 'synthesize' not the more modern understanding as in 'synthetic fabric'. This was a problem I had very much trouble becoming aware of, using both definitions is a necessity. pimoebius) .
It's my opinion that ancient symbols and their meaning do not convey the kind of information we in our modern age need to learn from the transcendental function. What is physically present is where meaning is hidden but it's not in every moment's content. I think of a lighthouse with it's beacon always moving but the beam can be fixed, held captive in an obsessive, compulsive activity. Theodore Reik was obsessed with reading everything he could find that Goethe had written when he was 18 years old but he was embarrassed to reveal his 'obsession'! When he was middle aged he wrote Fragment of A Great Confession, which he believed was about Goethe's life when he wrote it. Later he recognized details of his own life had been the foundation for the story of Goethe's relationship to a young Fredericke.
There's a scene in a movie, Little Buddha in which the starving Siddartha overhears two men passing in a canoe say: "If the string is too tight it will break, if it is too loose it will not play." They're talking about a musical instrument but the words detach from their context and Siddartha slowly rises, hearing them in a new way that is literally a statement to him, useful and necessary.
That is a 'function' of the transcendental function.
He goes to the river, and repeats the words to a bullock in the river, joyfully but with understanding: "If the string is too tight it will break; if it is too loose it will not play." The 'middle way' was revealed in that incident. I'm not certain that's exactly how Siddartha became aware of the necessity for balance because extremes can be deadly and destructive. But that kind of event has happened to me often enough to use it as an example.
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I remember reading an article in Seventeen Magazine when I was about that age (1949) about intelligence, and how intelligent individuals have certain characteristics. They had erect posture, bright eyes, eagerness to learn new things and curiosity. A sentence in the article remained with me afterwards, occurring into my mind often enough that I noticed it and remembered where I'd read it: "Intelligence is the ability to identify isolated but related facts and to form them into theories that explain the universe." The sentence was one of a very few 're-occurring memories' of events that happened only once but for some reason was regenerated afterwards often enough that I noticed them and had a minor degree of curiosity about them.
The first paragraph in the introduction of A New Model Of The Universe by P. D. Ouspensky is about certain re-occuring memories that were marked by a certain 'singular sensation peculiar to them' and that those memories were essentials in his life. I believe my re-occurring memories were critical moments in my earliest years.
What is the 'transcendental function' if it's not an 'effect' added to every day real world events...., that operates in life....., on particular events for some purpose that has it's origin in what I think of now that I've experienced it myself, as the 'ongoing endeavor in Time'. That is probably what has been recognized centuries ago as 'perennial philosphy' at work, moving 'like' a signal, through Time as we experience Time. There's lots of variety in Time, I've experienced that myself. More about that later.
What is the 'transcendental function' if it's not an 'effect' added to every day real world events...., that operates in life....., on particular events for some purpose that has it's origin in what I think of now that I've experienced it myself, as the 'ongoing endeavor in Time'. That is probably what has been recognized centuries ago as 'perennial philosphy' at work, moving 'like' a signal, through Time as we experience Time. There's lots of variety in Time, I've experienced that myself. More about that later.
If that long paragraph doesn't make sense consider this example that illustrates the concept: Laying nearby me is a book published in 1895 A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew White. It has 78 pages in the index of names the author mentions and quotes from. There are 50 names approximately on each page, so there were 50 x 78 = 3900 sources for the ideas that Andrew White compressed into his book.
The process of abstraction of relevant material occurred through the operation of the transcendental function, that seems reasonable to me now. I have witnessed in my self, that there's some part of 'me' that is always alert, awake and waiting until the right situation. I am an observer to it, it is not me. It is abstract itself, it's not tangible itself and it abstracts relevant information holding it in some mental storage area until it's complete or close to making sense. Mr. White wrote a large book about a topic that's as much at the center of life on this planet in 2010 as it was in 1895. Having abstracted here and there information that caught his attention, fragments from 3900 authors are cached in this book. Some modern authors have a bibliography that's more than a 100 pages long.
The process of 'abstracting relevant information' from so many sources is difficult to discern and identify, it happens because attention is not usually focussed on what's going on in our 'head'. It's likely the transcendental function has functioned as it is supposed to do but perhaps the 'next level' requires becoming detached from the body, and becoming an observer to it and that information generating function.
Until an individual knows as much as possible about history, philosophy, the origins of psychiatry itself, it may be difficult or impossible to learn to get new meaning when it emerges in the mind, until a change occurs that creates distance between 'me' and my thought, so that I observe it, the way I observe what's outside of my body.
What if Siddartha had heard the boatmen in the same way he had obviously heard everything until that 'extra sense' caused him to hear differently?
The process of 'abstracting relevant information' from so many sources is difficult to discern and identify, it happens because attention is not usually focussed on what's going on in our 'head'. It's likely the transcendental function has functioned as it is supposed to do but perhaps the 'next level' requires becoming detached from the body, and becoming an observer to it and that information generating function.
Until an individual knows as much as possible about history, philosophy, the origins of psychiatry itself, it may be difficult or impossible to learn to get new meaning when it emerges in the mind, until a change occurs that creates distance between 'me' and my thought, so that I observe it, the way I observe what's outside of my body.
What if Siddartha had heard the boatmen in the same way he had obviously heard everything until that 'extra sense' caused him to hear differently?
Knowing more about the history and evolution of psychiatric ideas is critical. Theodore Reik mentioned that Greek milkmaids knew already what Freud wrote down as psychiatry.
More about that later.
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